Why did it take an insane person to actually get sensible regulation for food dyes in? Rhetorical question because I think people like RFKJr got into power because previous administrations didn't take care of the obvious things that need regulation, and if you ignore the basics for too long people flip over to someone who packages a couple of reasonable stances with a lot of damaging ideas.
I agree with RFK for pushing for change in this industry but I give him no credit, instead I blame previous administrations on both sides for not taking a better stance on regulating food like every other developed country in the world.
> Why did it take an insane person to actually get sensible regulation for food dyes in?
They still aren't regulating it, they just held a press conference announcing, literally "we don’t have an agreement; we have an understanding" (and, as covered in this article, no one in the food industry seems to know who exactly the "understanding" is with).
Meanwhile they're firing anyone at the FDA or HHS that can do anything, and the EPA is trying to not regulate coal plants while the Trump administration uses emergency powers to keep coal plants running even over the economic objections of the power companies running them. And of course the EPA is delaying and relaxing the new limits on PFAS in drinking water from last year.
So...no, not really any sensible regulations here.
But it is creating real change already? All you have to do is ask, apparently. Regulation is coming, but not going to complain that companies are preemptively taking action.
I'm not going to complain, but real change of what? It's no apparent loss, so I'm happy to say "cool", but we know we won't even be able to measure any public health benefit of what this non-binding, non-regulatory "understanding" is going to bring about.
Seems more like some number of food companies are happy to go along with something that costs them basically nothing, while anything meaningful won't actually be done or is actually in the process of being reversed.
You should note, that Republicans only decided to go after artificial colors after the industry had already solved this "problem" for a hundred other countries.
Meanwhile, all this hubbub over "artificial" vs "natural" colors is fucking nonsensical. Very very few of the "artificial" colors have some evidence of maybe causing some harm from chronic exposure. Not that you should have chronic exposure to any of these foods in the first place since the sugar and fat and salt content alone is unhealthy and will cause you significant chronic health problems unless you exercise for a couple hours a day.
But it doesn't matter whether a chemical is produced by some process in nature or some process in a lab. What matters is how the human body reacts to it. Do we have tomes of evidence that eating "natural" colors is actually safe? No, we do not. Most of them are just GRAS (Generally recognized as safe, which is an outright misnomer) and therefore have no evidence of any safety other than "We used in the 50s so whatever".
Nevermind that "natural" food dyes aren't even! To make "natural red #4" involves taking large amounts of carminic acid from some bugs and reacting that with aluminum or calcium salts. In fact in the US, you can do pretty much whatever you want to a naturally sourced chemical and still call the product of that chemistry "natural".
Replacing well studied, simple, dyes with less studied dyes just because a core part of their chemistry was able to be sourced from """Nature""" is utterly stupid and pointless and meaningless. What actually matters is replacing ingredients that show some toxicity to chronic exposure with ingredients that have significant data to show they are not chronically toxic. There's no structural system in "natural" dyes to actually do that.
This push will not stop Dupont from extracting curcumin from turmeric, massively modifying it to make it easier for an industrial process to use without fouling up their equipment, accidentally make it cancerous after you eat it for 20 years, and poison us all with a "natural" chemical for decades.
"Natural" has no structural overlap with "Isn't unhealthy". Organic Ricin will kill you just as dead.
One interesting thing about Trump is he’s so deeply popular with the Republican base that he can win elections despite being drastically outspent by the opposition. He also uses tools like primaries and executive orders against those who oppose him.
So whereas a normal candidate may be concerned about upsetting the corporations that fund their election, Trump has built a little bit of insulation against that. He can (and does frequently) take on big corporations other politicians would feel the need to not alienate.
No other Republican would dare cross agribusiness.
He also, for the same reasons, is able to make Republican politicians adopt his positions. So if he wants to do something that democrats already want to do (and that’s not as uncommon as you might think; he was a Democrat for decades) it gets done easily.
RFK Jr is the worst person, but he deserves credit when he’s right.
As a scientist I don’t think this change is really science based.
Banning artificial colors because “chemicals are bad” isn’t logical. Banning artificial dyes because one random paper maybe found a cancer link isn’t rational (generally if studies are all over the place the effect is so small you’re seeing noise).
If you want to avoid artificial dyes, cool, avoid them! But blanket bans of dyes where the data is questionable about harm isn’t logical.
The problem isn't that "chemicals are bad" but that we don't know which chemicals are bad. Ones that we have been eating for centuries are unlikely to be significantly harmful and we can stop consuming them them when evidence is found. But for things that we haven't been eating for that long we don't really know. Right now the system is sort of set up as default-allow. So what happens is that some company wants a blue dye because they think blue candy will sell. They try things until they find something that isn't obviously harmful and start selling it. Then in 20 years it is found that it actually was harmful in the long term and impacted a huge swath of the population. The company then searches around until they find another blue dye that isn't obviously harmful and the cycle repeats.
To some degree we do need to experiment and try new things. However for something like food dyes it likely isn't really worth the risk. Or at least they are far overused. Many of the foods with dyes aren't that healthy anyways, so maybe it is is best to have them less attractive to avoid ingesting more chemicals which we don't have strong long-term evidence that it is safe.
We see a very similar cycle with plastics, refrigerants and many other things. We use something for a long time before realizing that it actually has harmful effects, then industry just creates a new very similar chemical that isn't known to be bad yet (or at least isn't bad in the same way the last one is). In some cases it is probably worth it (refrigeration is a valuable technology) but in the cases where it isn't as valuable to society we should be much more conservative with what we allow.
That being said, the proposed regulation isn't scientific and doesn't play with this nuance. A more reasonable approach would be raising the standards for introducing new chemicals (natural or artificial) to food. Not just banning anything "artificial" (whatever that means).
Yes, and due to having been used for a long time we are aware of the effects (and at least for lead have implemented reasonable rules around its use).
My point is that the longer we have used and consumed something the better we understand it. We are more likely to know and understand the risks. So we should be extra cautious with new materials. Something that we have been eating for hundreds of years with no known negative effects is wildly different than something that a company discovered (naturally or artificially) last year and didn't find any negative effects with some short-term tests.
Trump admin is trying to prevent the banning of asbestos, and undo the regulations that have been banning it. Trump seems convinced that "it's all fine, actually" and policy is being based around that, but the catalyst seems to be that the Biden era finalized the last ban on the last type of asbestos still being used (which would take up to twelve years to take effect anyway).
It wouldn't surprise me at this point if the Trump administration started rolling back regulations on lead pipes and enforcing minimum cadmium concentrations in tobacco.
As a non-scientist, I am not really any more qualified to give an opinion on this than any random person, but the fear around food dyes seems way overblown IMO.
You can read the statement from the FDA where they banned red dye 3, it's very short. [1] Here's a relevant quote:
>claims that the use of FD&C Red No. 3 in food and in ingested drugs puts people at risk are not supported by the available scientific information.
As a scientist there are a few things to drive my opinion it’s overblown:
- you can’t prove a negative (“this dye isn’t harmful”), all you can do is run a panel of tests and interpret the data
- food additives are tested in animal models at levels that are several orders of magnitude higher than what any human might consume. Animals are then autopsied to see if there are *any abnormalities in any organ system. This is done with several species.
- Cell models are also used to test things like carcinogeniticity, cell-specific toxicity, toxicity of chemicals formed when the additive breaks down, toxicity of trace impurities, etc. It’s quite extensive.
- Data is rarely 100% clear. You may get a signal in some animal model at 1000x expected exposure. What does it mean? Plenty of animals exhibit toxicity not seen in humans and slight abnormalities may or may not translate to humans. But the FDA tends to err on the side of caution, especially with food additives as there is little benefit to offset any risk.
- It’s not unusual to run 10 studies, find 9 are negative, 1 shows a signal but it’s not statistically significant. What RFK tends to do is cherry pick the 1 study and say “there is data to prove it’s harmful!” That’s not how science works. You look at the totality and quality of the data and make the best conclusion you can. Is it 100% foolproof? Of course not, but it’s pretty solid evidence that likely no harm will result.
- The one risk is the “unknown unknowns”. If you don’t know what to look for, you’ll never find it. But that’s true with everything we ingest - drugs, natural foods (peanuts and aflatoxin!), synthetic chemicals, water purification chemicals, etc, etc. We can only do the best with the knowledge we have.
- If you see 10 studies and 5 are positive (barely) and 5 are negative, either the effect is really small (I.e. you should worry more about other things) or it’s just noise.
I have the same view, and I was hoping that someone would provide some evidence as to why they are harmful in typical quantities found in foods. It seems to me that because these additives are so widely used, we would know for sure if they were dangerous.
We have extremely pervasive health problems across the west, and many theories (you can surely think of 20), but all of them are weak under scrutiny, specifically because the phenomena are effectively impossible to isolate and pin down. You can't actually achieve a strong signal.
So if multiple studies link a low-value and/or easily replaceable additive to problems, we can remove it as a precaution.
Food colorants in particular serve _primarily_ an advertising role. In general, advertising junk food to children is often restricted and highly contested. The difference here is the child is expected to physically consume the artefact.
We should adopt a "default deny" stance and contested ingredients at least should show some kind of value. You can make a case for many preservatives. Paint is not like that.
That fails the scientific method in several places.
Science doesn’t ban things with questionable data from poorly designed studies when other studies say the opposite.
Science doesn’t ban things because of some other problem where a causal link hasn’t been proven.
We already have a “default deny” system in place. Unless you have data saying it’s safe (according to regulations), a chemical can’t be used as a food additive.
Edited to add:
GRAS definition....."the use of a food substance may be GRAS either through scientific procedures or, for a substance used in food before 1958, through experience based on common use in food Under 21 CFR 170.30(b), general recognition of safety through scientific procedures requires the same quantity and quality of scientific evidence as is required to obtain approval of the substance as a food additive."
It literally says “GRAS must meet the same standards as new additives”.
The only reason GRAS exists is that FDA regulations have changed over time.
Unless you wanted all food additives immediately banned until years of tests could be conducted, the FDA created GRAS based on the evidence at the time but also required additional studies to bring existing additives up to the same safety standards as new additives.
Feel free to click on any of the GRAS decisions to read all about the studies done.
Science is a tool for finding truth, or at least weighing evidence. It isn’t policy and doesn’t have anything to say about policy.
You can have a policy of waiting for overwhelming proof of harm before banning anything. But there are an awful lot of chemicals added to our food and environment, with precious few studies competently and honestly tracking their effects. I want a much more careful policy - don’t put unknown chemicals in my body without convincing me the benefit.
Easy, just avoid any processed food. Eat only fresh meat, fruit, and vegetables. Make your own bread, jams, pickles, etc. Never eat any fast food, anything from a cafe, or anything at a restaurant. Wrap all your work lunches in linen you made yourself from flax you grew yourself. Boom, problem solved, no more toxic chemicals in your food unless they were in the air or groundwater where your fruits and vegetables were grown, harvested, or processed, or your cattle grazed or were slaughtered or packaged.
Why would one color meat, fruit or vegetables? This can create false expectation of their freshness and quality and must be banned. This is much easier solution.
Also coloring cheese should be banned. I always choose cheese without dyes but many people might be not aware that many types of cheese are artificially colored.
It's called the precautionary principle. It's generally a good idea. And yes, you have to implement it at the regulatory level because otherwise Food Inc. will try to get away with everything they can.
As a chemist, I can tell you that nearly everything you can think of -- "natural" or otherwise -- has been correlated to some negative outcome, in some organism, by some (usually crappy) study. These get laundered and blurred into "linked to negative health effects", by the lay press, which is widely repeated by people who don't know what they're talking about. P-hacking virtually guarantees that this will be the case, as long as someone, somewhere has the incentive to publish.
If you apply the "precautionary principle" this broadly, there's nothing left. It's basically the same reason that everything is labeled as "linked to cancer" by CA prop 65 (e.g. coffee, or...trees [1]).
Dye is not an essential component of food and therefore should be banned, at least for food that has natural color (like meat or cheese). Not only it might be harmful, it causes false expectation of quality and freshness and should not be allowed. Because otherwise for a manufacturer it is easier to color low-quality product rather than make high-quality product.
The precautionary principle is not entirely benign. Here, though, it's not even apposite: the dyes being ditched here have been intensively studied for decades.
The precautionary principle is not "Ban scary sounding things", it's "Prove that chemical is safe before you can expose people to it", which places like the EU often attempt to do.
But notably, nothing about this action takes any steps or effort towards enforcing "Prove it is safe BEFORE you sell it" and "natural" does not make any impact there. Ricin is plenty natural, so is methanol, and this change would not stop you from selling people literal poison as long as it wasn't already banned.
If Bayer makes a new derivative of carminic acid ("Natural" red #4) tomorrow that is easier for production lines to handle but also gives you cancer if you eat it for 20 years, there's no legal requirement that they demonstrate it doesn't give you cancer before they can sell it. It is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY as a consumer to do that science for them! It being "Natural" is utterly meaningless marketing bullshit.
None of this bullshit safety theater makes any of us more safe.
As I note elsewhere, this isn't exactly damaging though. Most other countries already encouraged manufacturers to develop formulas without artificial dyes, primarily due to differences in consumer opinion (which is usually similarly not fact based), so companies are going to make a big hubub about how this will be so hard for them and then they just shut down the "this is American specific" production line and retool it for the international formula and then insist that they made such a huge change to help everyone.
But "natural colors only" has zero relation to "more healthy", and that goes double when you are talking about processed food. If you actually wanted people to eat healthier, you would be better off banning all food coloring additives, all food texture additives, and anything that lets you modify how food presents itself after processing. People would buy less processed food if it all looked like what it actually was.
Other countries have better food than the US because 1) They often force food additives to be PROVEN safe before any use and much more importantly 2) consumers are way more discerning about food. European bread doesn't have a spoonful of sugar or sugar syrup because Europeans don't want their bread to be addictively sweet, while Americans objectively buy more bread that's been sweetened than "normal" bread. I'm not a fan of treating "revealed preferences" as too meaningful, but it's hard to sell bread to people who wont buy it because they would rather eat the cake in bread form. So it's important to ask why Europeans want their cakes cakey, and their bread not.
>You wouldn’t eat something you don’t know if it’s edible just because it has a nice color
Easy for you to say while writing a HN comment, but people would certainly be turned off by gray yolks[1] for instance, even if theoretically they were safe to eat.
These colors are all extensively tested, precisely because people were scarred of them being "unnatural".
The "natural" colors HAVE NOT been tested so extensively.
So do you want to put "Natural" but utterly untested chemicals in our food or "unnatural" but extensively tested chemicals?
Because unless you ban food coloring outright, companies are going to color your food. They have the data that in the American market, (fake) bright yellow yolks sell more and for more profit than natural yolk colors.
Your assumption of "artificial dye" == "Untested" is currently wrong. The US requires almost no testing for pretty much anything put in our food right now, due to "Generally recognized as safe" bullshit. There are hundreds of chemical additives that have not really been tested that you can just put in food legally.
US food law does not distinguish between "artificial" chemicals and "natural" chemicals except in labeling. You can source a chemical from oranges, turn it into a completely different chemical, put that in your food product, and call it "natural". The only difference from a chemistry standpoint is that you sourced your chemical feedstock from some sort of plant or animal instead of taking simple hydrocarbons and building up your chemical.
Salicylic acid does the exact same thing in your body whether you process it from willow bark or build it up from Phenol, and both versions are simultaneously a horrible birth defect inducing toxin, as well as an utterly essential and safe modern medicine.
I think that's the biggest issue nowadays/back then: we don't test shit like at all and find out decades later that it destroys us. For what? Because the market incentivizes temporary gains for "competitiveness". The whole system is misaligned. We have those e/acc and silicon valley peeps telling us it's for the PrOgReSs and it's necessary. All the while they eat grass fed beef. You gotta live what you preach!
They may eat "grass fed beef" (which in no way magically makes a steak any healthier) but they are the same people who microdosed LSD for two years because it was the fad of the time.
They aren't super aware and taking advantage of us, they are actually that utterly stupid. They are the epitome of that software dev you worked with who only just learned about <thing> yesterday, read a few articles and wikipedia pages, and assume they must know enough about <thing> to have better takes than people who have been working knee deep in <thing> for 30 years. They love to say they are "reasoning from first principles" because they have no actual expert experience to how those "first principles" haven't been useful or relevant in that field for centuries.
It's the classic "I know just enough to be dangerous" problem we are all familiar with of Users of our software products, the kind that uninstall System32 to "speed up their machine" like the internet told them, but 100 million people gave them the power of the US government. They vastly overestimate how much of the space they have so far learned, and don't even know how much they don't know.
Even the whole notion of abolishing the food pyramid to advocate for more fibrous whole foods (e.g., vegetables, fruits) and stylizing it as a plate was her idea, later coopted by RFK Jr.
Google AI says: "While the term "insane" is subjective, dumping a bear carcass in Central Park is both illegal and highly inadvisable."
RFK believes "For decades, the CDC has kept a tight grip on the Vaccine Safety Datalink, concealing vital vaccine safety information from the public," - IE that CDC has conspired to conceal harmful effects of vaccines. If he finds that database, I'll gladly sit up and listen. But until he finds it I'll consider this a conspiracy theory and, according to Psychology Today, belief in conspiracy theories is not necessarily associated with mental disorders.
I disagree with a lot of people in the Trump administration, but I only use the word insane (in the subjective sense, not in the literally diagnosed sense) to describe RFKJr.
I don't give him credit because he comes to his view from a lot of dangerous mistrust of science and medicine. I know a lot of people at CDC who work on flu vaccines and AIDs research, and my step-father was on the team that eradicated smallpox. RFKJr has done unimaginable harm to public health and is pushing us backwards. The people at CDC genuinely want to help people. You can say they've done things wrong, overstepped in some way, or have too much research money from private industry, and that could be a good discussion. No group is perfect, but the answer isn't to destroy it all, or think the CDC is part of a conspiracy.
I think food dyes need more research and better understanding before deploying to millions of people, that is not the same as his anti-science stance. While breaking a lot of things, he also happened to do something good, I don't think that counts as "solving the actual problem".
And, as far as your last point about previous administrations I meant both democrat and republican, but it's been obvious a long time that Democrats pandering would cause a backlash.
At any rate, I don't discount peoples ideas as brainwashing or preconceived ideas, even people I disagree with. I want America to succeed. Trump even did a few things in his first term I agreed with. You seem to have a filter to think people who don't buy into this "new golden age" are brainwashed or tribal. This isn't true. Spend some time considering other view points.
I doubt you'll agree with any article sources I could provide, and for a lot of diseases it doesn't happen immediately. Measles is one - 285 cases in 2024, so far in 2025 there have been 1214. I'm sure you'll have a reason that is unrelated, so not sure what evidence I can provide.
Anecdotally, I know people who track flu to create the vaccine for next year, basically tracking trends in other countries that have leading indicators. People have been fired/rehired/fired from these positions across multiple rounds. Imagine not knowing if you'll be somewhere next week. The instability has caused a lot of people to look at other jobs. The smart people have options will leave when they think there's a better chance, the dumb ones will stay. Public health, which are like the roads - it's easy to forget how much work is involved to keep up - is going through a brain drain. These are people who are doing real work, for everyone, not just people who can't afford healthcare.
Since anecdotal stories probably don't sway you, check out reddit for public health and see how the actual workers: https://www.reddit.com/r/publichealth/
I'm sure none of this will affect your opinion, so can you provide hard data that what he is doing is good?
My favorite photo of Trump is him grinning his ass off because he forced RFK Jr not to kiss the ring, but to touch a cheeseburger. They really do deserve each other.
The writing was on the wall for this before RFK Jr got installed. He may or may not be putting it over the finish line, but things were moving in that direction anyway. In 2023, California passed a law banning some additives effective 2027 [1].
In 2016, Mars pledged to remove artificial dyes from their products by 2021 [2]; they didn't do it [3], but they pledged to.
Even in the 90s artificial dyes already had a bad reputation. The manufacturers must have considered removal and it's shocking to me that their analysis must have guided them to keep them in despite nobody really asking for them. I guess people love bright colors.
It's goes back even further. Artificial dyes already had bad reputations by the late 70s.
In the mid-late 70s labels on foods and cleaning products told you exactly what was in them. I remember because my father was an organic chemist by training, and he would look at most labels and explain what was in them, and why we weren't buying them. (My family ended up shopping for most of our groceries at organic food stores.)
It turns out that a lot of people didn't want those ingredients either, and it was impacting sales, so companies successfully lobbied to get the disclosure requirements watered down. These days labels in the US basically tell you nothing.
I studied organic chemistry in college, and there's little as disturbing to me as "natural flavors" or "natural colorings". You have no idea what the chemicals are, what they were extracted from, how they were extracted, and what compounds/processes were used in the extraction. It's a non-label that tells you nothing about what's actually in the food.
We should be entitled by law to know what we're consuming, so that we can actually make informed decisions, and industrial food manufacturers don't want us to know, and have spent vast sums of money to ensure that we can't easily find out.
> In the mid-late 70s labels on foods and cleaning products told you exactly what was in them.
This is not true, and for some reason this seems to be a common urban myth.
The distinction between natural and artificial flavors goes back to 1906, and in 1938 there was a stronger law requiring the disclosure of artificial flavoring, color, or preservatives. I don't know if you're referring to the 1958 Food Additives and Amendment Act, but that didn't really affect ingredient listings either -- it was about food safety, not disclosure. But there was nothing substantially different about ingredient listings between the 1970s and today. I honestly don't know where you got this information, or what kind of ingredients you were under the impression that your father was able to analyze. The 1960s and 1970s was definitely the era when awareness around these things began to grow among consumers, so it definitely helps explain your father's attention to these things. But the idea that disclosure requirements have been watered down, or that this is due to corporate lobbying, is something like an urban legend. There are certainly issues around trade regulation and naming, like which species of fish are or are not allowed to be labeled as catfish, similar to how champagne can only come from a particular region of France. So there is definitely massive lobbying around geographical disclosures and naming. But the idea that there has been some kind of massive shift of disclosure in terms of chemicals is just not true. If you look up the ingredients on actual historical processed snack labels from the 1970s, they're not any different from today.
> I studied organic chemistry in college, and there's little as disturbing to me as "natural flavors" or "natural colorings". You have no idea what the chemicals are, what they were extracted from, how they were extracted, and what compounds/processes were used in the extraction. It's a non-label that tells you nothing about what's actually in the food
Ironically, this is what the legislation is moving toward: Anything "natural" is good, while anything "chemical" is bad to a lot of the world.
"natural flavors" and "natural coloring" is also aggravating when you have food allergies. An example is paprika, which is sometimes listed and sometimes not. I hate that practice so much
What people say they want and what people choose to buy are very different things.
If you ask people "Do you want ____" in isolation, they'll always say "No" if they thing you're asking about has any negative connotation.
If you put two different products on the shelf next to each other that differ by that same thing and even advertise it prominently (e.g. one says "No artifical dyes or coloring") most people would probably choose the brighter one because, at time of purchase, their reveleaed preferences are actually different. Now add an extra $0.10 to the retail price for sourcing more expensive natural colorings and even more people will choose the artificial coloring version.
This pattern plays out prominently in all things food related. If you ask people "Do you wish the food supply was healthier?" everyone is going to tell you "Yes". Then when they're deciding where to go for lunch or what to order, they'll skip right past the healthy items and choose what tastes the best.
These hypothetical free-lunch questions are useless because consumers will always claim they don't want the thing they don't understand. If you ask people if they want their food to be "preservative free" they'll tell you yes, until they see their food going bad immediately and their options dry up. Ask if they want "anti caking agents" removed from food and they'll emphatically agree, until their shredded cheese is sticking together. Food science and popular opinion are two different worlds.
> What people say they want and what people choose to buy are very different things.
As the mac & cheese box featuring Super Mario in the article hints, a big chunk of these people are children. Is it any surprise they don't make the most rational of choices?
On the other hand, this is like asking an alcoholic if he wishes to quit drinking. He'll say yes, but then go into a bar on his way home from work... People claim to want to be healthy, yet their discipline isn't perfect and their will is not iron - what hypocrites!
On the third hand - people do vote and lobby for what they say they want (in this case banning artificial dyes). Why should we give preference to their decisions in the market, vs. their decisions in the voting booth? Or in other words - why do purchasing decisions reveal preference, but voting decisions do not?
The problem historically was that when consumers were given detailed ingredient labels, they often decided to not purchase the products. Chemical and food manufacturers spent vast amounts of money to get ingredient labels watered down so that consumers wouldn't see the chemical names. In the 70s labels were much more detailed.
Labels like "natural flavors" exist to cover up what's actually in the food. "natural vanilla flavoring" sounds much nicer than "vanillin and acetovanillone extracted from waste sawdust".
It's not just the bright colors. The color of food greatly influences our perception of it. My grandmother was a caterer for many years, and she would tell me that the main difference between a chocolate cake and a vanilla one, is that one is brown. If you colored a cake brown, people would start to perceive it a chocolate.
2004 eastern US reporting in, can confirm the school Mountain dew conspiracy. I wonder if there's a site dedicated to tracking these kind of pre-social media viral memes and conspiracies. (I should say 'mass' social media since myspace was a thing, just barely anyone used it)
Why does it take so long? Existing EU recipes are already compliant
Kraft’s European products have for years used natural colours such as turmeric, paprika, beet juice or no colouring at all. That is why the 2025 U.S. pledge to go dye free by 2027 is largely irrelevant on this side of the Atlantic. So 2027? That does not make sense at all.. it's a n economic perspective, not a healthy one.
EU and US supply chains are vastly different, plus shifting the production lines from one to another doesn't happen overnight. This means that it could well take two years to fully move all their production facilities off synthetic food dyes.
Demanding an entire industry change everything overnight doesn't work. Suppliers have to ramp up production, processes have to be reworked, purchasing contracts have already been set a year in advance.
I don't understand why Americans accept this behavior from corporates. They are basically poisoning people for economic reasons. Why don't they use that extra profit, made over the health of millions, to speed up this process.
Because the USA politicians for the most part do what corporate interests want. When it looked like consumer interests might gain a foothold in 1960-1970s, a member of the US chamber of commerce wrote the Powell memo as a guide to corporate responses to consumer activism, this is still followed by USA corporations and he was appointed to US Supreme Court to put his influence on legal standards for generations. He’s not the first nor the last as traditionally in the USA due to how weak the framers made the federal government originally, a private public partnership is always exalted as the best of both worlds for governance but this leads to regulatory capture we have now without sufficient safeguards. edit: an adjacent comment mentions GRAS,Generally Recognized as Safe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generally_recognized_as_safe - laws in the USA last forever unless new laws supercede them so this law set in stone thousands of chemicals (including the aforementioned dyes) as safe because they didn't kill anyone quickly in 1958 and companies are free to use those in food - only a handful of items have been removed since then because the FDA is required to scientifically prove harm, unlike how those items got put on the list.
I understand the need to phase out/in ingredients in this situation, however I've never understood when there is a simple ban on an unnecessary ingredient why it takes long. I'm specifically talking about those "microbeads" in bodywash that were banned a few years ago. The companies got years to phase them out. They served no real purpose and were not replaced with anything. Companies just had to stop adding them to the bodywash - why give them years to do so? I get that labelling would be inaccurate so give them a few months to change that.
Of course the beads served a purpose: they were abrasive and exfoliating. And they were given time because they have to sell their existing inventory and use all the beads they already have purchased to put in their products.
Not sure why you're greyed out, because you're correct that those were literally exfoliant face washes. (No real loss in phasing them out because there are much better ways to exfoliate than rubbing your face with little pellets, but it wasn't some meaningless design choice.)
Sorry, yes I realize their purpose, but I meant the product still worked without them, so they could have stopped adding them and continue to sell the product. I guess the same is technically true for food dyes. I just mean that there are times where the ingredient is critical to the product, microbeads was not one of them.
With something like that it's tough, though, because they sold those as an _exfoliating wash_ product, but if you take away the beads it's not exfoliating anymore. So you'd either have to rebrand it to remove any mentions of exfoliation (at which point it becomes a totally different product) or rework the ingredients list to include a "chemical" exfoliant rather than the "physical" exfoliant (but that also drastically alters the product, especially since some people avoid chemical exfoliants).
Not defending microbeads—those products were truly shit, both for your skin and for the environment—I just want to illustrate that it might not be so straightforward.
I think we give these companies too much leeway. I live in Canada and there is a palpable hate on for American's following the "51st State" talk. This has led to increased patriotism and companies are cashing in. Within weeks, many retail products started to relabel and emphasize "Made In Canada". So it can be done, we shouldn't listen to them when they tell us "it's not that easy" because they've demonstrated it is easy when it means potentially more revenue.
They'd have to scrap all the food currently in the production and distribution pipeline, plus there would be a gap in food delivery as producers switch over to a new process. It's less disruptive to transition gradually.
Similar to why the USAID closure was gradual and gave aid recipients plenty of time to find new donors, because we wouldn't want hundreds of thousands of women and children to die of starvation and disease just to save a few bucks or wring out more viral memes [1].
Tumeric sometimes contains lead. I think only in India so far, but the FDA is about to move lots of testing to the states. Hopefully on a roadtrip or layover you won't have to research each state you are in before eating.
Lumping all artificial dyes together is a sign the regulations RFK Jr. is proposing or implementing are unscientific. These are different chemicals, and actual scientific or medical arguments would treat them as such.
There's plenty of good discussion possible about which additives in food should be regulated more. But making this kind of unscientific push is harmful in the end.
I somewhat support being unscientific in this case.
It's not as though food dyes are being used to make healthy foods more palatable. It's quite the opposite, that food colorings are used to make processed foods more stimulating, which in turn makes non-processed foods less attractive.
I support this in the same way that I'd support an outright ban on processed food advertising (especially to children). There is a health crisis in the US (and much of the western world), with one factor being the prevalence and poor nutrition provided by processed foods.
Pet food is some of the most unsanitary "food" on earth. A lot of it is mass produced overseas with little to no regard as to the safety of the ingredients, and I would venture to say at least half of it is adulterated. We only find out about it when large numbers of pets start dying.
I mean the company that makes M&Ms and Kind Bars also makes Whiskias and Royal Canin. In the end I don't get why it matters. Do we not expect there to be good standards for both?
When I was a kid it was still considered normal for your dog to sleep outside. Most people drew the line at chaining your dog instead of having a fence, but that was about it. My dad built an insulated doghouse for our dog rather than let her stay inside. I thought that was weird, but I was the “weird kid” so who cares what I thought.
The number of things I thought should be true at that age that finally are is baffling. Even accounting for recent regressions.
Why would it be weird to have a dog sleep in a shelter outside? Lots of people have dogs not just as pets, but to guard their property, and it's done all over the world.
My parent's shepherds stand by the door at bedtime asking to be let out to their dog house.
In Smithfield Virginia there's a big Smithfield Foods pork plant, and right next door is Premium Pet Health, which is a Smithfield-owned pet food plant. I've only ever been in the Smithfield plant, and it seems fine. Very industrial, but similar to other meat plants.
One of the lesser known things about heavily processed dog food is kind of dark. People don’t realize that they use animals from shelters that have been put down in dog food. It’s been a while, but I had read a few years ago that they found three amounts of the medicine they used to put animals down in dog food. I also recall your before that reading that some shelters make money by selling the dead animals they put down to food processing companies.
That sounds highly inefficient and therefore unlikely. Just thinking about the logistics of slaughtering all these different breeds of dogs makes me doubt that it can be done profitably.
I don’t think this is a science or safety issue, it’s an issue with bad ingredient labeling. They should name these numbered dyes something more understandable. “Red dye 4” sounds pretty sketchy when they could say “Cochineal extract for coloring”. People can reject the product because the ingredients include a bug derived coloring rather than fear of the unknown “red dye” invented by their imagined evil food scientists.
When I was a kid I ate lunch with a girl who couldn’t have M&Ms because she was allergic to the red die. I was appalled by this.
And the strangest thing about that story is that she was maybe 4 years old when Mars pulled the red M&Ms due to a cancer scare with a different red food coloring. Though my recollection was that it was a few years more recent than that, given how shelf life and supply chains work, I may have been getting back stock. I think I eventually proved to her that there were no red M&Ms anymore. I guess her parents hadn’t bothered to check for years. Not the first injustice I had tried to right but the easiest one.
Five years later they added Red back and I would think of her every time I ate M&Ms for a long time after.
Wikipedia reports red M&Ms were eliminated in 1976, and added back in 1987. I'm sure it took several months for these changes to make it to the marketplace, but probably not years; M&Ms have a reasonable shelf life, but they do degrade, so year old stock isn't great.
My Mom was pretty salty about the red M&Ms going missing, and refused to eat blue M&Ms for quite some time.
As I said, I’m pretty sure that number is wrong by a little. And does 76 mean January or December? That’s a long time for small children. This thread is about people announcing things and then taking a while to do them. But we were in a town hit particularly hard by a recession. I have no doubt they were turning inventory closer to the Best By date than yours was. I bet all those sales I remembered seeing (3 for a dollar!) were overstock.
The only reason they add dyes, outside of baked goods IMO, is because they've used so many artificial ingredients, fillers, and preservatives that the resulting food product no longer looks appetizing. Whole, fresh food has never needed dyes added to it to be enticing to our monkey brains.
Carmine is better known as Red 4 these days. Doesn't have much taste. Saffron adds basically no taste in the amounts typically used for something like Saffron rice. Squid ink again, mostly for the striking color. The taste isn't particularly great.
Turmeric can go both ways, but the ground turmeric that's historically common for preservation reasons is much less flavorful than the fresh root. It's mostly a color thing.
Of course, we can also just open up a medieval cookbook to see what they say. The Forme of Cury is a nice 14th century example that's available from Gutenberg:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8102
As to colours, which perhaps would chiefly take place in suttleties, blood boiled and fried was used for dying black. saffron for yellow, and sanders for red. Alkenet is also used for colouring, and mulberries; amydon makes white; and turnesole [for yellow]
Alkanet is commonly used today for Rogan josh, but historically would have been more known for rouge and dying wine. A Mediterranean cookbook might have instead chosen amaranth for the same purpose
You need so little tumeric or annatto to color food and they impart so little flavor in so many applications that the reason they are used is very obvious.
Fruits and vegetables from a few hundred years ago would be almost unrecognizable and unpalatable to modern consumers. The colorful, delicious, and durable fruits and vegetables of today are the result of lots of work and selective breeding.
Most fruits and vegetables in grocery stores taste pretty bland. They're bred more for appearance, shelf stability, regularity, and transport rather than taste.
There are legendary varieties that are lost to time. Occasionally we rediscover them, and we get to compare. Usually the modern industrial varieties are pale imitations.
Although you're free to like/dislike whatever you want, calling other people's food vile seems kind of mean. There are plenty of old/ancient foods that look exactly the same as jell-o
warabi-mochi, nata-de-coco, aiyu jelly, kokum, annindofu, kanten, blancmange, to name just a few
Jell-o is a byproduct of the meat industry, none of what you listed seems as bad nor look as bad as a mass produced artificially colored and artificially flavored blob of pork gelatin seating in a plastic cup.
If anything I'd say my take is less insulting to these other dishes than you are by comparing them to jell-o
Wild salmon have their characteristic color because they are eating organisms that contain the naturally occurring Astaxanthin. Farmed salmon subsist on grains, fish oils, etc and come out looking grey unless pigments are added to their feed.
interesting, the Salmon I have caught has not been as colorful- I mostly fish in the rivers though
edit: it looks like that vid had some steelhead (trout) mixed in? This is more like what I have seen, but the color is even more "dulled" in person https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e09UmeqAd4g
Because being unhealthy is the natural state of things, and keeping a handle on that fact, at scale, is difficult and complicated. We used to do a much worse job of it, though. Humans living in developed economies where everyone eats all these oft-maligned foods live much longer than their ancestors did a few centuries ago. And those who live into old age tend to remain healthier longer than those who did a few centuries ago.
That's to say that there isn't room for improvement, or that there aren't things in our food supply that don't belong there. But a sense of perspective is important. "Is this food coloring increasing people's lifetime risk of a specific cancer from 0.005% to 0.01%?" is still a pretty tidy improvement over, "Ugh, yet another outbreak of ergotism. Well, why don't we try burning witches to see if that puts it to a stop."
One of the things they have that people in developed economies generally don't is a 50% infant mortality rate.
The ones that don't achieve it through access to very unnatural artifacts such as vaccines that are quite likely to have been made using ultramodern technologies such as genetic modification.
Or, I've got quite a few friends who have various congenital conditions that mean that they absolutely would not have survived in a society with a more "natural" foodway. With the modern food supply chain, though, they're doing just fine. Unnatural things you get in some ultraprocessed foods, such as vitamin fortification, mean they can even do it without having to worry about developing comorbid chronic ailments due to malnutrition.
That is a survival bias. Ironically if you want signs of good health practice look for unhealthy people - it means that they can survive vs the unhealthy just dying.
A really good example of this was the paper that kicked off the whole "omega-3 fatty acids for heart health" thing. It ultimately got retracted.
The gist of the paper was that they observed that Inuit communities have really low rates of heart disease, and hypothesized that it could be because their traditional diet is very high in omega-3 fatty acids. The problem is, they don't actually have low rates of heart disease. They just have low rates of heart disease diagnosis, because they also have limited access to health care.
Little s Science can’t get “corrupted” because it is just a tool. When the scientific method is used to determine what people prefer to buy based on one second of looking at the product, that is arguably an immoral use of the scientific method especially if the health of the users is not taken into account.
That’s also to say that “trust the science“ can be a dangerous way to shut down discussion when people are actually grasping for words to understand whether a scientific method is being improperly used.
Are people so unhealthy? Life expectancies continue to rise. The "a majority of americans have a chronic health problem" stats include things like back pain. It turns out that if you live a long time you get chronic health problems.
There's doubt about this. While high sugar and low fiber is problematic, sheer quantity might be a bigger culprit. And some indigenous populations seem to remain relatively healthy on low-fiber diets (i.e. eating mostly animal products).
What bugs me the most about companies like Kraft is that they could have replaced artificial dyes and ingredients any time they wanted to, but didn't. Clearly these companies are in it to make money, and they will sell the public whatever the public will eat, synthetic ingredients be damned, but maybe.. just maybe the government should be much, much more restrictive on the ingredients that goes into our foods...
> What bugs me the most about companies like Kraft is that they could have replaced artificial dyes and ingredients any time they wanted to, but didn't
They had replaced a lot of them already. Kraft's most iconic product (Mac & Cheese) replaced the artificial dyes years ago and this is only the last 10% of their products.
The fact that this is a legitimate question is very concerning. Some of these dyes are/were ubiquitous and there is very little research about them. IIRC a few have evidence of harm. Nothing should be this widely deployed without understanding them more.
If you were more questioning "Is natural actually better for people or just a nice sounding word" which could also be implied by your question, I agree with that, with the caveat that artificial stuff has more potential for surprises since it doesn't have the history of being used safely "natural" stuff does, and should have a higher bar of research.
It's also an easy thing to focus on. How many products that use dyes are extremely unhealthy for other reasons? If you are buying a cereal loaded with sugar and pretend to care about dyes for health reasons I'm going to laugh at you.
There are a lot of different artificial dyes. Most of them haven't been extensively studied in a rigorous way. It probably isn't even possible to determine whether they have any negative effects on human health because there's no ethical or affordable way to run that experiment. Since dyes are purely cosmetic and there's no actual need for them then it might be better to just avoid the risk.
The greater problem is normalization of unhealthy food across an entire supermarket. Then it becomes unavoidable and invisible to consumers.
My personal bugaboos are added sugar and generous use of weird preservatives. If your supermarket has 20 aisles, 16 of them are loaded with sugary sulfite-preserved stuff, removing choice and visibility to consumers. And breads fortified with folic acid.
Re: preservatives, I remember watching a video a few years ago, where a woman decided that she didn't like all the preservatives in store-bought tortillas, so she was going to make them herself at home. It's a really simple thing to make, so why not?
They all went stale before the day was out. She compared the ingredients between what she had made and what came out of the box at the grocery store, and the ones that she didn't use? They were all preservatives.
Choose your battles wisely.
I will concede that the use of sweeteners in everything in the US is unhinged. It's hard to really understand until you've spent enough time out of the country to where you're buying groceries and looking at the ingredients. You come back to the states and everything tastes weirdly sweet. It was a real "fish don't know they're wet" moment for me, which mostly came about from marrying an Australian.
This is fair, but I think overstated. It's possible to preserve a tortilla for a few days without exotic additives. I'm not even criticizing sodium, although that's not a lot better. And yes, preservatives are better than eating spoiled food.
The problem is when the whole supermarket is full of highly preserved food, then this is normalized and health consequences are obscured. The deeper issue is that for perhaps 80% of people this is fine and profitable, but for let's say 20% it introduces weird, hard to trace health problems, which don't appear to come from the supermarket because all the normal foods are like this.
I'm still upset that I picked up a set of those little fruit cup things advertising "no added sugar", only to be met by intensely bitter and gross flavor. Turns out they added monk fruit extract instead, as an artificial sweetener. To FRUIT. Fruit is naturally sweet!
Del Monte's No Sugar Added line of canned fruits often has Acesulfame Potassium and Sucralose in it. Similar no sugar added generic/house brands are similar.
Flour fortification is one of the great public health successes of the 20th century, and I’m not aware of any data showing that folic acid is any more harmful than any of the other synthetic B vitamins added to our food. I’ve actively looked for such data, as someone with the fairly common genetic mutation affecting MTHFR, and frankly all I find is nonsense.
To expand on "great public health successes": folic acid supplementation is particularly important if you're pregnant, because it significantly reduces the odds of having a baby with neural tube defects like spina bifida (which is one of the milder NTDs, frankly). But it's also important even if you're not pregnant because B vitamin deficiencies will wreck your health.
Yes, the FDA has been emphatic that the folic acid supplementation program is a success and we would be fools to think anything else. The reality, as best I can tell, is more nuanced and for a minority of people it's possible to have too much of a good thing, particularly where 5-MTHF would be more beneficial.[1]
I don't hope to resolve the debate, only to point out it should be possible to eat bread that is not fortified with folic acid, if for no reason than I'm not in the high risk group targeted by the FDA and there are potential benefits from reducing folic acid intake in the context of robust intake of folate from other sources.
Or, even simpler: why can't I buy bread without folic acid?
Right, so I looked at that paper and its citations, and I am still not seeing any studies showing that folic acid supplementation causes problems beyond "can mask signs of B12 deficiency," which is not very compelling. I did see one paper saying "we thought excess maternal folic acid consumption might lead to asthma in children, but nope, it doesn't." To be clear, my bias is actually against folic acid supplementation: we should be using bioavailable folate, at the very least in prenatal vitamins. But I just don't see any data showing actual harm from folic acid.
I can buy unfortified bread at each of the grocery stores in my small town. I can also buy it at the local bakery and at the bread stand at our small farmers market.
It would not surprise me that there are some places in the US that only have easy access to packaged industrial sandwich bread. It would surprise me very much if that was the norm for Americans.
This is interesting to me, because I'm not aware of anywhere I can get unfortified flour. Even the artisan bread at the farmer's market is usually made of flour subject to FDA regulations.
Bread is fortified with folic acid because it turns out it is really important for brain development during pregnancy and it can be too late to take supplements if you wait until you find out that you are pregnant. This is a positive public health intervention.
> Clearly these companies are in it to make money, and they will sell the public whatever the public will eat,
You are correct, but I find it alarming that anyone would deem this necessary to say out loud. These companies would happily watch us suffer an die from chronic illnesses en masse if it inched up their share value, as would any for-profit enterprise. The phrase "duh" comes to mind. The only thing stopping them is government regulation, though that approach is under perpetual attack by anti-government zealots, the most recent of which being Musk and his child assistants.
Absolutely, stop subsidizing corn and glucose syrup through ag policy, and tax sugar consumption. Mexico taxed sugar to mitigate obesity to great success. GLP-1s destroy demand (Walmart already sees this in their purchasing data for consumers who are on GLP-1s), but we should also restrict supply by not subsidizing it in the first place. Why are we paying both to make the poison and then treat the poison? Not very capital efficient!
So if that's your concern, why are you talking about manipulating the market for the supply of one food, rather than taxing high GI foods? Or is it a case of corn syrup being good enough?
I completely agree with removing subsidies. I'm less convinced that ingredients should be banned. Weirdly the entire "supplement" industry can do whatever they want.
Not banned, taxed. These are behavioral economic nudges to encourage healthier outcomes. You can still get a Coca Cola, but the economics shouldn’t make it your primary source of hydration, right? If you’re expecting “will power” to fix this, the evidence is robust [1] that is not going to happen.
We tax alcohol and cigarettes similarly, and I don’t think it’s wild to consider processed sugars close to that same category from a health and reward center perspective.
Yes to the point of having it go under FDA review along with PFAS, BPA, mercury, etc. If sugar can survive their empirical heath analyses, then you can have all you want. Everyone should go and comment on the FDA's public docket if they feel the same: https://www.regulations.gov/docket/FDA-2025-N-1733
They don't care until there is some combination of public and government pressure, so you just have to keep pressuring, forever. Corporations are fundamentally unaccountability laundering profit machines (limited liability, nebulous shareholder ownership), and must be treated accordingly.
Which is the worst part about all of this: It took government pressure and calling them out to force a change. My anger at government is why they didn't do this SOONER? Why did it take someone like RJF jr. to move this needle? After all the people we've had at Sec. of Agriculture, HHS, and FDA Commissioners..
I don't think this was because people were putting pressure, otherwise the sheer numbers of those communities would have done something by now. It only required one person in power to say enough, fix this.
It isn't correct to see these changes a singular improvement. These rules are constantly being fought over, sometimes becoming stricter, sometimes looser.
This is accepting the premise that something synthetic is automatically worse than something extracted more directly from nature. I'm all for researching and banning substances which are actually harmful, but not for paranoia and the automatic assumption that a certain amount of chemistry turns something "natural" into something bad.
For example carmine is crushed up cactus parasite insects which a very small number of people are vulnerable to extreme allergic reactions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochineal
>much more restrictive on the ingredients that goes into our food
How much human testing of every agricultural product do you want?
It’s bizarre, reading people here defending the artificial food dyes. Most of these are derived from petroleum. The stuff that comes out of the ground and powers your car and lubricates gears. It’s in your food and you’re OK with that?
I agree, but it looks like the article title is now "Backlash to artificial dye grows as Kraft ditches coloring for Kool-Aid, Jell-O". Seems like that's what their clickbait testing algorithm landed on.
Science (FDA) is what has allowed all the hyper-processed foods and food additives that are so often criticized here. Seems a bit disingenuous to suddenly recast those concerns as the "whims" of an ignorant person just because of his political affiliation. Take wins where you can get them.
That said Kraft is just positioning itself to provide what it thinks the market will want. They haven't suddenly found some ethics and decided they are going to produce good healthy food for its own sake.
The only institution cited in this article is from the "California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment" study. Otherwise it was consumer advocate groups. No FDA studies are cited and these are direct quotes from the article we both read,
>Kraft is the latest company, including Tyson Foods and PepsiCo, to transition from artificial colors for popular products under pressure from government officials.
“The FDA has failed for so many decades that state legislators had no choice but to step in to protect our kids.”
The FDA science isn't and hasn't been behind it but at state government scales dietary memes and their profitable consumer groups are influential enough. And now the feds have been coopted and the FDA is being forced into this by Kennedy. They're trying to migitate the damage as much as possible on the way down. Lets hope the replacements are so well and throughly vetted by science and time as the ones being banned for no reason but 'natural = good' memes.
The FDA 'allowing' hyper processed foods is a just what you get when you don't ban things pre-emptively or because you don't think people should be eating them.
People blame science when a company does something they don't like and then credit the free market when it does something they do, forgetting that a huge public company doesn't do anything because it is the right thing, they do it because they think they will make money by doing it.
We can either change the incentives that exist to sell people hyper processed food, or we can regulate everything to death, or we can figure out how to make people not want to eat it. I'm not sure which answer is the best one, but I think that making scientists the boogeymen for a human incentive problem is the wrong way to find it.
This is basically a stopped clock happening to be right.
AIUI, there's ample evidence that (certain) artificial food dyes can cause various problems. I know that I have anecdotal evidence that they can—even in "blind" situations, where we didn't realize they were in the food until after having problems—cause things like headaches, lightheadedness, and other vague but unpleasant reactions.
I find it frustrating that, as another commenter said, it took an absolute nutter like RFK Jr to make this happen, and also that I have to give him credit for anything positive—but it's pretty clear that this specific thing is, indeed, positive.
> The most common synthetic food dyes in the U.S. — including Blue 1, Blue 2, Red 40, Yellow 5, and Yellow 6 — are all approved for use in Europe. They use different names for them there, which may account for some of the confusion.
Way too many people are getting their information on this topic from things like Tiktok and Instagram. Every video on there just proclaims how the EU has banned food dyes and additives that we use, therefore they're unsafe and we should ban them as well.
Never mentioned is that the US has also banned food dyes and additives that are still in use in the EU.
Getting rid of pharma ads is going to be a first amendment issue, and should be struck down, as it likely will. Creating an environment where the goverment can single out who the first amendment does and doesn't apply to is far far worse than pharma advertising.
The first amendment doesn't apply as broadly to commercial speech as it does normal speech. There's already restrictions placed on it and a framework for deciding if further restrictions would be acceptable.
> The Central Hudson test has a threshold prong – does the speech concern lawful activity and is it non-misleading. If it meets these requirements, then there are three other prongs:
> The government must have a substantial interest.
> The regulation must directly and materially advance the government’s substantial interest.
> The regulation must be narrowly tailored.
It would seem like restricting medical ads would be within the realms of constitutionally acceptable government power.
If the Pharma industry as it exists, today could exist without federal government regulation, then I think you might have a point.
The government is so intertwined in the Pharma industry, that no I don’t really see a 1A problem here.
Sparing misused, and completely incorrect fire in a theater, tropes, there is a good point we made that freedom of speech does not extend to unnecessarily dangerous things. Remind me which company has received the largest criminal fine in history (Pfizer).
I just don’t think you’re gonna have a lot of sympathy for oh poor Pharma companies and their lack of free speech.
No. I don't think the fractal what ifs concerned them.
Do you think the original intention of the first amendment was to have a scattered subjective enforcement based on prevailing popular winds at any given time?
It would cost companies money to change their formula for food products and most additives are made by petrochemical companies so two industries with very strong lobbies to fight to keep them in use.
The red dye they use in a lot of stuff is absolutely psychoactive. I used to intentionally consume things with it on long drives because it zaps my short term memory so I don't get bored and fall asleep. I noticed this effect after eating some red candy while trying to do math homework in college.
The downside of course is that once you get where you're going you're practically retarded for the next 12 hours or so and can't get any work done.
I thought it was moderately well known. A couple of decades ago a friend would take some red candy when hiking as it could give her (at least the feeling of) a significant short-term energy boost if needed, more than just regular sugar would.
I actually thought that particular red dye was banned where I'm from some time back, though I don't recall why. Allergies perhaps? But that's just a guess.
You'll have to look for it yourself I guess? I don't know if anyone has even tried studying it, the effect is pretty subtle if you don't know to look for it. I'm just posting my experiences with it.
You can't just make a massive claim like that about such a common ingredient without backing it up. I'm not saying it's not true, it could be, but it's just inappropriate to state something is true like that with 0 evidence aside from personal experience.
You complainers are missing the mark. You obviously can make extraordinary claims (see above for evidence).
What isn't reasonable is to also expect large numbers of people to take them seriously without evidence (see above for evidence of people questioning unsupported claims).
Cherries are absolutely dangerous because when I eat them my breathing gets difficult. No idea why they still allow companies to sell them to people...
I'm sure you can grasp how ridiculous that statement is, and reflect on your own.
For the people downvoting this comment - it's a relatively well researched topic covered by at least three major studies with published papers, etc. If you are not aware of something, it does not necessarily mean it is wrong.
Why did it take an insane person to actually get sensible regulation for food dyes in? Rhetorical question because I think people like RFKJr got into power because previous administrations didn't take care of the obvious things that need regulation, and if you ignore the basics for too long people flip over to someone who packages a couple of reasonable stances with a lot of damaging ideas.
I agree with RFK for pushing for change in this industry but I give him no credit, instead I blame previous administrations on both sides for not taking a better stance on regulating food like every other developed country in the world.
> Why did it take an insane person to actually get sensible regulation for food dyes in?
They still aren't regulating it, they just held a press conference announcing, literally "we don’t have an agreement; we have an understanding" (and, as covered in this article, no one in the food industry seems to know who exactly the "understanding" is with).
Meanwhile they're firing anyone at the FDA or HHS that can do anything, and the EPA is trying to not regulate coal plants while the Trump administration uses emergency powers to keep coal plants running even over the economic objections of the power companies running them. And of course the EPA is delaying and relaxing the new limits on PFAS in drinking water from last year.
So...no, not really any sensible regulations here.
But it is creating real change already? All you have to do is ask, apparently. Regulation is coming, but not going to complain that companies are preemptively taking action.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/hhs-fda-...
I'm not going to complain, but real change of what? It's no apparent loss, so I'm happy to say "cool", but we know we won't even be able to measure any public health benefit of what this non-binding, non-regulatory "understanding" is going to bring about.
Seems more like some number of food companies are happy to go along with something that costs them basically nothing, while anything meaningful won't actually be done or is actually in the process of being reversed.
You should note, that Republicans only decided to go after artificial colors after the industry had already solved this "problem" for a hundred other countries.
Meanwhile, all this hubbub over "artificial" vs "natural" colors is fucking nonsensical. Very very few of the "artificial" colors have some evidence of maybe causing some harm from chronic exposure. Not that you should have chronic exposure to any of these foods in the first place since the sugar and fat and salt content alone is unhealthy and will cause you significant chronic health problems unless you exercise for a couple hours a day.
But it doesn't matter whether a chemical is produced by some process in nature or some process in a lab. What matters is how the human body reacts to it. Do we have tomes of evidence that eating "natural" colors is actually safe? No, we do not. Most of them are just GRAS (Generally recognized as safe, which is an outright misnomer) and therefore have no evidence of any safety other than "We used in the 50s so whatever".
Nevermind that "natural" food dyes aren't even! To make "natural red #4" involves taking large amounts of carminic acid from some bugs and reacting that with aluminum or calcium salts. In fact in the US, you can do pretty much whatever you want to a naturally sourced chemical and still call the product of that chemistry "natural".
Replacing well studied, simple, dyes with less studied dyes just because a core part of their chemistry was able to be sourced from """Nature""" is utterly stupid and pointless and meaningless. What actually matters is replacing ingredients that show some toxicity to chronic exposure with ingredients that have significant data to show they are not chronically toxic. There's no structural system in "natural" dyes to actually do that.
This push will not stop Dupont from extracting curcumin from turmeric, massively modifying it to make it easier for an industrial process to use without fouling up their equipment, accidentally make it cancerous after you eat it for 20 years, and poison us all with a "natural" chemical for decades.
"Natural" has no structural overlap with "Isn't unhealthy". Organic Ricin will kill you just as dead.
One interesting thing about Trump is he’s so deeply popular with the Republican base that he can win elections despite being drastically outspent by the opposition. He also uses tools like primaries and executive orders against those who oppose him.
So whereas a normal candidate may be concerned about upsetting the corporations that fund their election, Trump has built a little bit of insulation against that. He can (and does frequently) take on big corporations other politicians would feel the need to not alienate.
No other Republican would dare cross agribusiness.
He also, for the same reasons, is able to make Republican politicians adopt his positions. So if he wants to do something that democrats already want to do (and that’s not as uncommon as you might think; he was a Democrat for decades) it gets done easily.
RFK Jr is the worst person, but he deserves credit when he’s right.
As a scientist I don’t think this change is really science based.
Banning artificial colors because “chemicals are bad” isn’t logical. Banning artificial dyes because one random paper maybe found a cancer link isn’t rational (generally if studies are all over the place the effect is so small you’re seeing noise).
If you want to avoid artificial dyes, cool, avoid them! But blanket bans of dyes where the data is questionable about harm isn’t logical.
The problem isn't that "chemicals are bad" but that we don't know which chemicals are bad. Ones that we have been eating for centuries are unlikely to be significantly harmful and we can stop consuming them them when evidence is found. But for things that we haven't been eating for that long we don't really know. Right now the system is sort of set up as default-allow. So what happens is that some company wants a blue dye because they think blue candy will sell. They try things until they find something that isn't obviously harmful and start selling it. Then in 20 years it is found that it actually was harmful in the long term and impacted a huge swath of the population. The company then searches around until they find another blue dye that isn't obviously harmful and the cycle repeats.
To some degree we do need to experiment and try new things. However for something like food dyes it likely isn't really worth the risk. Or at least they are far overused. Many of the foods with dyes aren't that healthy anyways, so maybe it is is best to have them less attractive to avoid ingesting more chemicals which we don't have strong long-term evidence that it is safe.
We see a very similar cycle with plastics, refrigerants and many other things. We use something for a long time before realizing that it actually has harmful effects, then industry just creates a new very similar chemical that isn't known to be bad yet (or at least isn't bad in the same way the last one is). In some cases it is probably worth it (refrigeration is a valuable technology) but in the cases where it isn't as valuable to society we should be much more conservative with what we allow.
That being said, the proposed regulation isn't scientific and doesn't play with this nuance. A more reasonable approach would be raising the standards for introducing new chemicals (natural or artificial) to food. Not just banning anything "artificial" (whatever that means).
Tobacco and alohol are significantly harmful and we have been consuming them for centuries. Also lead pipes
Yes, and due to having been used for a long time we are aware of the effects (and at least for lead have implemented reasonable rules around its use).
My point is that the longer we have used and consumed something the better we understand it. We are more likely to know and understand the risks. So we should be extra cautious with new materials. Something that we have been eating for hundreds of years with no known negative effects is wildly different than something that a company discovered (naturally or artificially) last year and didn't find any negative effects with some short-term tests.
Trump admin is trying to prevent the banning of asbestos, and undo the regulations that have been banning it. Trump seems convinced that "it's all fine, actually" and policy is being based around that, but the catalyst seems to be that the Biden era finalized the last ban on the last type of asbestos still being used (which would take up to twelve years to take effect anyway).
It wouldn't surprise me at this point if the Trump administration started rolling back regulations on lead pipes and enforcing minimum cadmium concentrations in tobacco.
> Right now the system is sort of set up as default-allow.
This is not true. Food additives need to go through an approval process. It’s right on the FDA website.
https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-and-gras-ingredients...
As a non-scientist, I am not really any more qualified to give an opinion on this than any random person, but the fear around food dyes seems way overblown IMO.
You can read the statement from the FDA where they banned red dye 3, it's very short. [1] Here's a relevant quote:
>claims that the use of FD&C Red No. 3 in food and in ingested drugs puts people at risk are not supported by the available scientific information.
[1] https://www.fda.gov/food/hfp-constituent-updates/fda-revoke-...
As a scientist there are a few things to drive my opinion it’s overblown:
- you can’t prove a negative (“this dye isn’t harmful”), all you can do is run a panel of tests and interpret the data
- food additives are tested in animal models at levels that are several orders of magnitude higher than what any human might consume. Animals are then autopsied to see if there are *any abnormalities in any organ system. This is done with several species.
- Cell models are also used to test things like carcinogeniticity, cell-specific toxicity, toxicity of chemicals formed when the additive breaks down, toxicity of trace impurities, etc. It’s quite extensive.
- Data is rarely 100% clear. You may get a signal in some animal model at 1000x expected exposure. What does it mean? Plenty of animals exhibit toxicity not seen in humans and slight abnormalities may or may not translate to humans. But the FDA tends to err on the side of caution, especially with food additives as there is little benefit to offset any risk.
- It’s not unusual to run 10 studies, find 9 are negative, 1 shows a signal but it’s not statistically significant. What RFK tends to do is cherry pick the 1 study and say “there is data to prove it’s harmful!” That’s not how science works. You look at the totality and quality of the data and make the best conclusion you can. Is it 100% foolproof? Of course not, but it’s pretty solid evidence that likely no harm will result.
- The one risk is the “unknown unknowns”. If you don’t know what to look for, you’ll never find it. But that’s true with everything we ingest - drugs, natural foods (peanuts and aflatoxin!), synthetic chemicals, water purification chemicals, etc, etc. We can only do the best with the knowledge we have.
- If you see 10 studies and 5 are positive (barely) and 5 are negative, either the effect is really small (I.e. you should worry more about other things) or it’s just noise.
As a non-scientist and definitely talking about anecdotes: I know of at least one kid who has Tourettes that is made worse by artificial dyes...
Also it's often hard to figure out...for example, is caramel color artificial or natural?
I have the same view, and I was hoping that someone would provide some evidence as to why they are harmful in typical quantities found in foods. It seems to me that because these additives are so widely used, we would know for sure if they were dangerous.
In context, entirely logical!
We have extremely pervasive health problems across the west, and many theories (you can surely think of 20), but all of them are weak under scrutiny, specifically because the phenomena are effectively impossible to isolate and pin down. You can't actually achieve a strong signal.
So if multiple studies link a low-value and/or easily replaceable additive to problems, we can remove it as a precaution.
Food colorants in particular serve _primarily_ an advertising role. In general, advertising junk food to children is often restricted and highly contested. The difference here is the child is expected to physically consume the artefact.
We should adopt a "default deny" stance and contested ingredients at least should show some kind of value. You can make a case for many preservatives. Paint is not like that.
That fails the scientific method in several places.
Science doesn’t ban things with questionable data from poorly designed studies when other studies say the opposite.
Science doesn’t ban things because of some other problem where a causal link hasn’t been proven.
We already have a “default deny” system in place. Unless you have data saying it’s safe (according to regulations), a chemical can’t be used as a food additive.
Edited to add:
GRAS definition....."the use of a food substance may be GRAS either through scientific procedures or, for a substance used in food before 1958, through experience based on common use in food Under 21 CFR 170.30(b), general recognition of safety through scientific procedures requires the same quantity and quality of scientific evidence as is required to obtain approval of the substance as a food additive."
> We already have a “default deny” system in place.
GRAS (Generally Regarded As Safe) defies this reasonable expectation.
https://www.fda.gov/food/food-ingredients-packaging/generall...
GRAS approvals include some rather novel food additives. Here is a list of recent notifications.
https://www.fda.gov/food/gras-notice-inventory/recently-publ...
It helps when you read your sources.
It literally says “GRAS must meet the same standards as new additives”.
The only reason GRAS exists is that FDA regulations have changed over time.
Unless you wanted all food additives immediately banned until years of tests could be conducted, the FDA created GRAS based on the evidence at the time but also required additional studies to bring existing additives up to the same safety standards as new additives.
Feel free to click on any of the GRAS decisions to read all about the studies done.
Science is a tool for finding truth, or at least weighing evidence. It isn’t policy and doesn’t have anything to say about policy.
You can have a policy of waiting for overwhelming proof of harm before banning anything. But there are an awful lot of chemicals added to our food and environment, with precious few studies competently and honestly tracking their effects. I want a much more careful policy - don’t put unknown chemicals in my body without convincing me the benefit.
> Science doesn’t ban things with questionable data from poorly designed studies when other studies say the opposite.
Science doesn’t ban anything. That is simply put not the role of science.
Science can inform decision making, but it is not the only valid way to make decisions.
> If you want to avoid artificial dyes, cool, avoid them!
Except in many cases it is hard to avoid them. Or very expensive.
Easy, just avoid any processed food. Eat only fresh meat, fruit, and vegetables. Make your own bread, jams, pickles, etc. Never eat any fast food, anything from a cafe, or anything at a restaurant. Wrap all your work lunches in linen you made yourself from flax you grew yourself. Boom, problem solved, no more toxic chemicals in your food unless they were in the air or groundwater where your fruits and vegetables were grown, harvested, or processed, or your cattle grazed or were slaughtered or packaged.
Why would one color meat, fruit or vegetables? This can create false expectation of their freshness and quality and must be banned. This is much easier solution.
Also coloring cheese should be banned. I always choose cheese without dyes but many people might be not aware that many types of cheese are artificially colored.
It's called the precautionary principle. It's generally a good idea. And yes, you have to implement it at the regulatory level because otherwise Food Inc. will try to get away with everything they can.
As a chemist, I can tell you that nearly everything you can think of -- "natural" or otherwise -- has been correlated to some negative outcome, in some organism, by some (usually crappy) study. These get laundered and blurred into "linked to negative health effects", by the lay press, which is widely repeated by people who don't know what they're talking about. P-hacking virtually guarantees that this will be the case, as long as someone, somewhere has the incentive to publish.
If you apply the "precautionary principle" this broadly, there's nothing left. It's basically the same reason that everything is labeled as "linked to cancer" by CA prop 65 (e.g. coffee, or...trees [1]).
[1] https://x.com/RhonaA_PhD/status/1056921307634380800
Dye is not an essential component of food and therefore should be banned, at least for food that has natural color (like meat or cheese). Not only it might be harmful, it causes false expectation of quality and freshness and should not be allowed. Because otherwise for a manufacturer it is easier to color low-quality product rather than make high-quality product.
"All dyes should be banned" is different than what is described here.
Is using annatto in cheddar cheese a dye? It doesn't affect the flavor and isn't essential to the product.
I only buy cheese without annatto.
The precautionary principle is not entirely benign. Here, though, it's not even apposite: the dyes being ditched here have been intensively studied for decades.
The precautionary principle is not "Ban scary sounding things", it's "Prove that chemical is safe before you can expose people to it", which places like the EU often attempt to do.
But notably, nothing about this action takes any steps or effort towards enforcing "Prove it is safe BEFORE you sell it" and "natural" does not make any impact there. Ricin is plenty natural, so is methanol, and this change would not stop you from selling people literal poison as long as it wasn't already banned.
If Bayer makes a new derivative of carminic acid ("Natural" red #4) tomorrow that is easier for production lines to handle but also gives you cancer if you eat it for 20 years, there's no legal requirement that they demonstrate it doesn't give you cancer before they can sell it. It is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY as a consumer to do that science for them! It being "Natural" is utterly meaningless marketing bullshit.
None of this bullshit safety theater makes any of us more safe.
As I note elsewhere, this isn't exactly damaging though. Most other countries already encouraged manufacturers to develop formulas without artificial dyes, primarily due to differences in consumer opinion (which is usually similarly not fact based), so companies are going to make a big hubub about how this will be so hard for them and then they just shut down the "this is American specific" production line and retool it for the international formula and then insist that they made such a huge change to help everyone.
But "natural colors only" has zero relation to "more healthy", and that goes double when you are talking about processed food. If you actually wanted people to eat healthier, you would be better off banning all food coloring additives, all food texture additives, and anything that lets you modify how food presents itself after processing. People would buy less processed food if it all looked like what it actually was.
Other countries have better food than the US because 1) They often force food additives to be PROVEN safe before any use and much more importantly 2) consumers are way more discerning about food. European bread doesn't have a spoonful of sugar or sugar syrup because Europeans don't want their bread to be addictively sweet, while Americans objectively buy more bread that's been sweetened than "normal" bread. I'm not a fan of treating "revealed preferences" as too meaningful, but it's hard to sell bread to people who wont buy it because they would rather eat the cake in bread form. So it's important to ask why Europeans want their cakes cakey, and their bread not.
Allowing artificial dyes that are consumed without proper testing for harm is illogical.
You wouldn’t eat something you don’t know if it’s edible just because it has a nice color
>You wouldn’t eat something you don’t know if it’s edible just because it has a nice color
Easy for you to say while writing a HN comment, but people would certainly be turned off by gray yolks[1] for instance, even if theoretically they were safe to eat.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/07/12/201501977/he...
While it's easy to fake a healthy golden yolk, in my experience raising chickens, pale yolks are usually from a troubled hen.
And?
Just because people don’t like grey yolk doesn’t mean we should put an untested color in it.
These colors are all extensively tested, precisely because people were scarred of them being "unnatural".
The "natural" colors HAVE NOT been tested so extensively.
So do you want to put "Natural" but utterly untested chemicals in our food or "unnatural" but extensively tested chemicals?
Because unless you ban food coloring outright, companies are going to color your food. They have the data that in the American market, (fake) bright yellow yolks sell more and for more profit than natural yolk colors.
Your assumption of "artificial dye" == "Untested" is currently wrong. The US requires almost no testing for pretty much anything put in our food right now, due to "Generally recognized as safe" bullshit. There are hundreds of chemical additives that have not really been tested that you can just put in food legally.
US food law does not distinguish between "artificial" chemicals and "natural" chemicals except in labeling. You can source a chemical from oranges, turn it into a completely different chemical, put that in your food product, and call it "natural". The only difference from a chemistry standpoint is that you sourced your chemical feedstock from some sort of plant or animal instead of taking simple hydrocarbons and building up your chemical.
Salicylic acid does the exact same thing in your body whether you process it from willow bark or build it up from Phenol, and both versions are simultaneously a horrible birth defect inducing toxin, as well as an utterly essential and safe modern medicine.
This change does nothing to make us safer.
Where did I say natural dyes should be used?
The subject was artificial dyes and parent found it illogical banning them without proper proof of harm.
My point is, at least for food, there should be proof of no harm.
I said nothing about natural dyes. Why do so many people read A is bad as not-A is good?
And if all is tested so well why was red 3 banned so late?
I think that's the biggest issue nowadays/back then: we don't test shit like at all and find out decades later that it destroys us. For what? Because the market incentivizes temporary gains for "competitiveness". The whole system is misaligned. We have those e/acc and silicon valley peeps telling us it's for the PrOgReSs and it's necessary. All the while they eat grass fed beef. You gotta live what you preach!
They may eat "grass fed beef" (which in no way magically makes a steak any healthier) but they are the same people who microdosed LSD for two years because it was the fad of the time.
They aren't super aware and taking advantage of us, they are actually that utterly stupid. They are the epitome of that software dev you worked with who only just learned about <thing> yesterday, read a few articles and wikipedia pages, and assume they must know enough about <thing> to have better takes than people who have been working knee deep in <thing> for 30 years. They love to say they are "reasoning from first principles" because they have no actual expert experience to how those "first principles" haven't been useful or relevant in that field for centuries.
It's the classic "I know just enough to be dangerous" problem we are all familiar with of Users of our software products, the kind that uninstall System32 to "speed up their machine" like the internet told them, but 100 million people gave them the power of the US government. They vastly overestimate how much of the space they have so far learned, and don't even know how much they don't know.
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Even the whole notion of abolishing the food pyramid to advocate for more fibrous whole foods (e.g., vegetables, fruits) and stylizing it as a plate was her idea, later coopted by RFK Jr.
https://apnews.com/article/health-healthy-eating-a9f5cd19e17...
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They did it. The Republicans rolled it all back.
Rolled back a banning of artificial dyes?
Gonna need a source for that.
The FDA has nothing to do with this action either though?
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Wow even in a thread about misinformation a misinformed person jumps in with a comment that adds nothing and attempts to derail.
> Why did it take an insane person
I think the mark of political insanity is labeling someone "insane" simply because you apparently partially disagree with them.
> but I give him no credit
So you're not interested in solving the actual problem in favor of ensuring your preconceived ideas are never changed?
> instead I blame previous administrations
Yea I can't imagine the type of person they would have been pandering to. :|
Google AI says: "While the term "insane" is subjective, dumping a bear carcass in Central Park is both illegal and highly inadvisable."
RFK believes "For decades, the CDC has kept a tight grip on the Vaccine Safety Datalink, concealing vital vaccine safety information from the public," - IE that CDC has conspired to conceal harmful effects of vaccines. If he finds that database, I'll gladly sit up and listen. But until he finds it I'll consider this a conspiracy theory and, according to Psychology Today, belief in conspiracy theories is not necessarily associated with mental disorders.
I disagree with a lot of people in the Trump administration, but I only use the word insane (in the subjective sense, not in the literally diagnosed sense) to describe RFKJr.
I don't give him credit because he comes to his view from a lot of dangerous mistrust of science and medicine. I know a lot of people at CDC who work on flu vaccines and AIDs research, and my step-father was on the team that eradicated smallpox. RFKJr has done unimaginable harm to public health and is pushing us backwards. The people at CDC genuinely want to help people. You can say they've done things wrong, overstepped in some way, or have too much research money from private industry, and that could be a good discussion. No group is perfect, but the answer isn't to destroy it all, or think the CDC is part of a conspiracy.
I think food dyes need more research and better understanding before deploying to millions of people, that is not the same as his anti-science stance. While breaking a lot of things, he also happened to do something good, I don't think that counts as "solving the actual problem".
And, as far as your last point about previous administrations I meant both democrat and republican, but it's been obvious a long time that Democrats pandering would cause a backlash.
At any rate, I don't discount peoples ideas as brainwashing or preconceived ideas, even people I disagree with. I want America to succeed. Trump even did a few things in his first term I agreed with. You seem to have a filter to think people who don't buy into this "new golden age" are brainwashed or tribal. This isn't true. Spend some time considering other view points.
> RFKJr has done unimaginable harm to public health and is pushing us backwards.
Show me the evidence this is true. I believe there's a term for people who believe things that haven't been proven. Could you ask google AI for me?
I doubt you'll agree with any article sources I could provide, and for a lot of diseases it doesn't happen immediately. Measles is one - 285 cases in 2024, so far in 2025 there have been 1214. I'm sure you'll have a reason that is unrelated, so not sure what evidence I can provide.
Anecdotally, I know people who track flu to create the vaccine for next year, basically tracking trends in other countries that have leading indicators. People have been fired/rehired/fired from these positions across multiple rounds. Imagine not knowing if you'll be somewhere next week. The instability has caused a lot of people to look at other jobs. The smart people have options will leave when they think there's a better chance, the dumb ones will stay. Public health, which are like the roads - it's easy to forget how much work is involved to keep up - is going through a brain drain. These are people who are doing real work, for everyone, not just people who can't afford healthcare.
Since anecdotal stories probably don't sway you, check out reddit for public health and see how the actual workers: https://www.reddit.com/r/publichealth/
I'm sure none of this will affect your opinion, so can you provide hard data that what he is doing is good?
My favorite photo of Trump is him grinning his ass off because he forced RFK Jr not to kiss the ring, but to touch a cheeseburger. They really do deserve each other.
The writing was on the wall for this before RFK Jr got installed. He may or may not be putting it over the finish line, but things were moving in that direction anyway. In 2023, California passed a law banning some additives effective 2027 [1].
In 2016, Mars pledged to remove artificial dyes from their products by 2021 [2]; they didn't do it [3], but they pledged to.
[1] https://text.npr.org/2023/10/10/1204839281/california-ban-fo...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190902043853/https://www.mars....
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20210204131124/https://www.cspin...
Even in the 90s artificial dyes already had a bad reputation. The manufacturers must have considered removal and it's shocking to me that their analysis must have guided them to keep them in despite nobody really asking for them. I guess people love bright colors.
It's goes back even further. Artificial dyes already had bad reputations by the late 70s.
In the mid-late 70s labels on foods and cleaning products told you exactly what was in them. I remember because my father was an organic chemist by training, and he would look at most labels and explain what was in them, and why we weren't buying them. (My family ended up shopping for most of our groceries at organic food stores.)
It turns out that a lot of people didn't want those ingredients either, and it was impacting sales, so companies successfully lobbied to get the disclosure requirements watered down. These days labels in the US basically tell you nothing.
I studied organic chemistry in college, and there's little as disturbing to me as "natural flavors" or "natural colorings". You have no idea what the chemicals are, what they were extracted from, how they were extracted, and what compounds/processes were used in the extraction. It's a non-label that tells you nothing about what's actually in the food.
We should be entitled by law to know what we're consuming, so that we can actually make informed decisions, and industrial food manufacturers don't want us to know, and have spent vast sums of money to ensure that we can't easily find out.
> In the mid-late 70s labels on foods and cleaning products told you exactly what was in them.
This is not true, and for some reason this seems to be a common urban myth.
The distinction between natural and artificial flavors goes back to 1906, and in 1938 there was a stronger law requiring the disclosure of artificial flavoring, color, or preservatives. I don't know if you're referring to the 1958 Food Additives and Amendment Act, but that didn't really affect ingredient listings either -- it was about food safety, not disclosure. But there was nothing substantially different about ingredient listings between the 1970s and today. I honestly don't know where you got this information, or what kind of ingredients you were under the impression that your father was able to analyze. The 1960s and 1970s was definitely the era when awareness around these things began to grow among consumers, so it definitely helps explain your father's attention to these things. But the idea that disclosure requirements have been watered down, or that this is due to corporate lobbying, is something like an urban legend. There are certainly issues around trade regulation and naming, like which species of fish are or are not allowed to be labeled as catfish, similar to how champagne can only come from a particular region of France. So there is definitely massive lobbying around geographical disclosures and naming. But the idea that there has been some kind of massive shift of disclosure in terms of chemicals is just not true. If you look up the ingredients on actual historical processed snack labels from the 1970s, they're not any different from today.
> I studied organic chemistry in college, and there's little as disturbing to me as "natural flavors" or "natural colorings". You have no idea what the chemicals are, what they were extracted from, how they were extracted, and what compounds/processes were used in the extraction. It's a non-label that tells you nothing about what's actually in the food
Ironically, this is what the legislation is moving toward: Anything "natural" is good, while anything "chemical" is bad to a lot of the world.
"natural flavors" and "natural coloring" is also aggravating when you have food allergies. An example is paprika, which is sometimes listed and sometimes not. I hate that practice so much
> despite nobody really asking for them
What people say they want and what people choose to buy are very different things.
If you ask people "Do you want ____" in isolation, they'll always say "No" if they thing you're asking about has any negative connotation.
If you put two different products on the shelf next to each other that differ by that same thing and even advertise it prominently (e.g. one says "No artifical dyes or coloring") most people would probably choose the brighter one because, at time of purchase, their reveleaed preferences are actually different. Now add an extra $0.10 to the retail price for sourcing more expensive natural colorings and even more people will choose the artificial coloring version.
This pattern plays out prominently in all things food related. If you ask people "Do you wish the food supply was healthier?" everyone is going to tell you "Yes". Then when they're deciding where to go for lunch or what to order, they'll skip right past the healthy items and choose what tastes the best.
These hypothetical free-lunch questions are useless because consumers will always claim they don't want the thing they don't understand. If you ask people if they want their food to be "preservative free" they'll tell you yes, until they see their food going bad immediately and their options dry up. Ask if they want "anti caking agents" removed from food and they'll emphatically agree, until their shredded cheese is sticking together. Food science and popular opinion are two different worlds.
> What people say they want and what people choose to buy are very different things.
As the mac & cheese box featuring Super Mario in the article hints, a big chunk of these people are children. Is it any surprise they don't make the most rational of choices?
On the other hand, this is like asking an alcoholic if he wishes to quit drinking. He'll say yes, but then go into a bar on his way home from work... People claim to want to be healthy, yet their discipline isn't perfect and their will is not iron - what hypocrites!
On the third hand - people do vote and lobby for what they say they want (in this case banning artificial dyes). Why should we give preference to their decisions in the market, vs. their decisions in the voting booth? Or in other words - why do purchasing decisions reveal preference, but voting decisions do not?
The problem historically was that when consumers were given detailed ingredient labels, they often decided to not purchase the products. Chemical and food manufacturers spent vast amounts of money to get ingredient labels watered down so that consumers wouldn't see the chemical names. In the 70s labels were much more detailed.
Labels like "natural flavors" exist to cover up what's actually in the food. "natural vanilla flavoring" sounds much nicer than "vanillin and acetovanillone extracted from waste sawdust".
...or is the most convenient
It's not just the bright colors. The color of food greatly influences our perception of it. My grandmother was a caterer for many years, and she would tell me that the main difference between a chocolate cake and a vanilla one, is that one is brown. If you colored a cake brown, people would start to perceive it a chocolate.
Chefs have a famous saying that "You eat with your eyes first." The color of one's food is a huge part of that first sample.
I can report that Crystal Pepsi tasted like Pesi and not Sprite at least, so there must be some limitations.
I can believe this for the cake itself, not the icing, which is probably what she/you mean. Interesting.
Just guessing, they did research and found that products with dyes sell better.
People say all sorts of things about what they do and do not want to buy, but actions speak louder than words.
Silly Rabbit! Original Trix With Artificial Colors Is Back After Customers Revolt
https://archive.ph/GFMs0
Oh yes there was huge conspiracy in my school of “Yellow 6” as found in Mountain Dew will shrink your testicles.
2004 eastern US reporting in, can confirm the school Mountain dew conspiracy. I wonder if there's a site dedicated to tracking these kind of pre-social media viral memes and conspiracies. (I should say 'mass' social media since myspace was a thing, just barely anyone used it)
Why does it take so long? Existing EU recipes are already compliant Kraft’s European products have for years used natural colours such as turmeric, paprika, beet juice or no colouring at all. That is why the 2025 U.S. pledge to go dye free by 2027 is largely irrelevant on this side of the Atlantic. So 2027? That does not make sense at all.. it's a n economic perspective, not a healthy one.
Supply chains.
EU and US supply chains are vastly different, plus shifting the production lines from one to another doesn't happen overnight. This means that it could well take two years to fully move all their production facilities off synthetic food dyes.
Demanding an entire industry change everything overnight doesn't work. Suppliers have to ramp up production, processes have to be reworked, purchasing contracts have already been set a year in advance.
I don't understand why Americans accept this behavior from corporates. They are basically poisoning people for economic reasons. Why don't they use that extra profit, made over the health of millions, to speed up this process.
Because the USA politicians for the most part do what corporate interests want. When it looked like consumer interests might gain a foothold in 1960-1970s, a member of the US chamber of commerce wrote the Powell memo as a guide to corporate responses to consumer activism, this is still followed by USA corporations and he was appointed to US Supreme Court to put his influence on legal standards for generations. He’s not the first nor the last as traditionally in the USA due to how weak the framers made the federal government originally, a private public partnership is always exalted as the best of both worlds for governance but this leads to regulatory capture we have now without sufficient safeguards. edit: an adjacent comment mentions GRAS,Generally Recognized as Safe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generally_recognized_as_safe - laws in the USA last forever unless new laws supercede them so this law set in stone thousands of chemicals (including the aforementioned dyes) as safe because they didn't kill anyone quickly in 1958 and companies are free to use those in food - only a handful of items have been removed since then because the FDA is required to scientifically prove harm, unlike how those items got put on the list.
Guessing it's to ramp-up suppliers, change equipment over, and stockpile enough for the transition.
I understand the need to phase out/in ingredients in this situation, however I've never understood when there is a simple ban on an unnecessary ingredient why it takes long. I'm specifically talking about those "microbeads" in bodywash that were banned a few years ago. The companies got years to phase them out. They served no real purpose and were not replaced with anything. Companies just had to stop adding them to the bodywash - why give them years to do so? I get that labelling would be inaccurate so give them a few months to change that.
Of course the beads served a purpose: they were abrasive and exfoliating. And they were given time because they have to sell their existing inventory and use all the beads they already have purchased to put in their products.
Not sure why you're greyed out, because you're correct that those were literally exfoliant face washes. (No real loss in phasing them out because there are much better ways to exfoliate than rubbing your face with little pellets, but it wasn't some meaningless design choice.)
Sorry, yes I realize their purpose, but I meant the product still worked without them, so they could have stopped adding them and continue to sell the product. I guess the same is technically true for food dyes. I just mean that there are times where the ingredient is critical to the product, microbeads was not one of them.
With something like that it's tough, though, because they sold those as an _exfoliating wash_ product, but if you take away the beads it's not exfoliating anymore. So you'd either have to rebrand it to remove any mentions of exfoliation (at which point it becomes a totally different product) or rework the ingredients list to include a "chemical" exfoliant rather than the "physical" exfoliant (but that also drastically alters the product, especially since some people avoid chemical exfoliants).
Not defending microbeads—those products were truly shit, both for your skin and for the environment—I just want to illustrate that it might not be so straightforward.
I think we give these companies too much leeway. I live in Canada and there is a palpable hate on for American's following the "51st State" talk. This has led to increased patriotism and companies are cashing in. Within weeks, many retail products started to relabel and emphasize "Made In Canada". So it can be done, we shouldn't listen to them when they tell us "it's not that easy" because they've demonstrated it is easy when it means potentially more revenue.
And run out existing contracts with existing suppliers.
They'd have to scrap all the food currently in the production and distribution pipeline, plus there would be a gap in food delivery as producers switch over to a new process. It's less disruptive to transition gradually.
Similar to why the USAID closure was gradual and gave aid recipients plenty of time to find new donors, because we wouldn't want hundreds of thousands of women and children to die of starvation and disease just to save a few bucks or wring out more viral memes [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/us/politics/usaid-cuts-do... / https://archive.is/5BIAF
Tumeric sometimes contains lead. I think only in India so far, but the FDA is about to move lots of testing to the states. Hopefully on a roadtrip or layover you won't have to research each state you are in before eating.
Lumping all artificial dyes together is a sign the regulations RFK Jr. is proposing or implementing are unscientific. These are different chemicals, and actual scientific or medical arguments would treat them as such.
There's plenty of good discussion possible about which additives in food should be regulated more. But making this kind of unscientific push is harmful in the end.
From the article:
"Some consumer advocacy groups argue the dyes aren’t worth the potential risk because they lack nutritional value."
It's the precautionary principle in action. Is it scientific? Not really. But does it make rational sense? Possibly.
I somewhat support being unscientific in this case.
It's not as though food dyes are being used to make healthy foods more palatable. It's quite the opposite, that food colorings are used to make processed foods more stimulating, which in turn makes non-processed foods less attractive.
I support this in the same way that I'd support an outright ban on processed food advertising (especially to children). There is a health crisis in the US (and much of the western world), with one factor being the prevalence and poor nutrition provided by processed foods.
I hope they remove them from animal food as well. Ol' Roy dog food uses tones of the stuff. Why?? So unnecessary.
Pet food is some of the most unsanitary "food" on earth. A lot of it is mass produced overseas with little to no regard as to the safety of the ingredients, and I would venture to say at least half of it is adulterated. We only find out about it when large numbers of pets start dying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_pet_food_recalls
When I was a kid Ralston Purina owned a bunch of human food enterprises as well and that always disturbed me.
I mean the company that makes M&Ms and Kind Bars also makes Whiskias and Royal Canin. In the end I don't get why it matters. Do we not expect there to be good standards for both?
When I was a kid it was still considered normal for your dog to sleep outside. Most people drew the line at chaining your dog instead of having a fence, but that was about it. My dad built an insulated doghouse for our dog rather than let her stay inside. I thought that was weird, but I was the “weird kid” so who cares what I thought.
The number of things I thought should be true at that age that finally are is baffling. Even accounting for recent regressions.
Why would it be weird to have a dog sleep in a shelter outside? Lots of people have dogs not just as pets, but to guard their property, and it's done all over the world.
My parent's shepherds stand by the door at bedtime asking to be let out to their dog house.
Because they’re pack animals and you’re their pack.
That doesn't make dog houses weird, especially for dogs that were purpose-bred for work/protection.
In Smithfield Virginia there's a big Smithfield Foods pork plant, and right next door is Premium Pet Health, which is a Smithfield-owned pet food plant. I've only ever been in the Smithfield plant, and it seems fine. Very industrial, but similar to other meat plants.
One of the lesser known things about heavily processed dog food is kind of dark. People don’t realize that they use animals from shelters that have been put down in dog food. It’s been a while, but I had read a few years ago that they found three amounts of the medicine they used to put animals down in dog food. I also recall your before that reading that some shelters make money by selling the dead animals they put down to food processing companies.
That sounds highly inefficient and therefore unlikely. Just thinking about the logistics of slaughtering all these different breeds of dogs makes me doubt that it can be done profitably.
Where on earth did you hear that?
I don’t think this is a science or safety issue, it’s an issue with bad ingredient labeling. They should name these numbered dyes something more understandable. “Red dye 4” sounds pretty sketchy when they could say “Cochineal extract for coloring”. People can reject the product because the ingredients include a bug derived coloring rather than fear of the unknown “red dye” invented by their imagined evil food scientists.
> Cochineal extract for coloring
95% of people wouldn't realize that's code for "insect juice," and they might prefer the artificial color.
Red 4 is already bug paste. Always has been. The “preference” based only on perception is just advertising.
Naturally colored candies use beet extracts for red.
Wait until people find out where jelly beans come from.
Jelly Belly doesn't use gelatin. They do use confectioners glaze, but that's closer to honey than to cochineal.
Since cochineal casues so many allergic reactions, there's already a law that they have to put it on the label.
When I was a kid I ate lunch with a girl who couldn’t have M&Ms because she was allergic to the red die. I was appalled by this.
And the strangest thing about that story is that she was maybe 4 years old when Mars pulled the red M&Ms due to a cancer scare with a different red food coloring. Though my recollection was that it was a few years more recent than that, given how shelf life and supply chains work, I may have been getting back stock. I think I eventually proved to her that there were no red M&Ms anymore. I guess her parents hadn’t bothered to check for years. Not the first injustice I had tried to right but the easiest one.
Five years later they added Red back and I would think of her every time I ate M&Ms for a long time after.
Wikipedia reports red M&Ms were eliminated in 1976, and added back in 1987. I'm sure it took several months for these changes to make it to the marketplace, but probably not years; M&Ms have a reasonable shelf life, but they do degrade, so year old stock isn't great.
My Mom was pretty salty about the red M&Ms going missing, and refused to eat blue M&Ms for quite some time.
As I said, I’m pretty sure that number is wrong by a little. And does 76 mean January or December? That’s a long time for small children. This thread is about people announcing things and then taking a while to do them. But we were in a town hit particularly hard by a recession. I have no doubt they were turning inventory closer to the Best By date than yours was. I bet all those sales I remembered seeing (3 for a dollar!) were overstock.
"... it’s an issue with bad ingredient labeling ..."
I've been working on some improved labeling for certain grocery products:
https://kozubik.com/items/ThisisCandy/
Awesome idea. Are you doing anything else in a similar vein?
The only reason they add dyes, outside of baked goods IMO, is because they've used so many artificial ingredients, fillers, and preservatives that the resulting food product no longer looks appetizing. Whole, fresh food has never needed dyes added to it to be enticing to our monkey brains.
People have been coloring food for thousands of years with dyes like Saffron, carmine, turmeric, and squid ink.
Those are spices with taste.
Carmine is better known as Red 4 these days. Doesn't have much taste. Saffron adds basically no taste in the amounts typically used for something like Saffron rice. Squid ink again, mostly for the striking color. The taste isn't particularly great.
Turmeric can go both ways, but the ground turmeric that's historically common for preservation reasons is much less flavorful than the fresh root. It's mostly a color thing.
Of course, we can also just open up a medieval cookbook to see what they say. The Forme of Cury is a nice 14th century example that's available from Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8102
Alkanet is commonly used today for Rogan josh, but historically would have been more known for rouge and dying wine. A Mediterranean cookbook might have instead chosen amaranth for the same purposeYou need so little tumeric or annatto to color food and they impart so little flavor in so many applications that the reason they are used is very obvious.
flash freezing some paprika to remove the flavor is probably easier than boiling coal in a vacuum to make red 3.
> Whole, fresh food has never needed dyes added to it to be enticing to our monkey brains.
Have you ever cooked? Most stews use spices for colouring. A paella looks ill without saffron in it.
_Most stews use spices for _coloring? A quick glance over my recipes and books shows none of the stews use any spices for colouring.
Fruits and vegetables from a few hundred years ago would be almost unrecognizable and unpalatable to modern consumers. The colorful, delicious, and durable fruits and vegetables of today are the result of lots of work and selective breeding.
Most fruits and vegetables in grocery stores taste pretty bland. They're bred more for appearance, shelf stability, regularity, and transport rather than taste.
There are legendary varieties that are lost to time. Occasionally we rediscover them, and we get to compare. Usually the modern industrial varieties are pale imitations.
https://gastropod.com/the-most-dangerous-fruit-in-america/
jell-o of any color looks absolutely vile to me
Although you're free to like/dislike whatever you want, calling other people's food vile seems kind of mean. There are plenty of old/ancient foods that look exactly the same as jell-o
warabi-mochi, nata-de-coco, aiyu jelly, kokum, annindofu, kanten, blancmange, to name just a few
Jell-o is a byproduct of the meat industry, none of what you listed seems as bad nor look as bad as a mass produced artificially colored and artificially flavored blob of pork gelatin seating in a plastic cup.
If anything I'd say my take is less insulting to these other dishes than you are by comparing them to jell-o
That’s not super true. Salmon for instance. Or Easter eggs.
Wild salmon have their characteristic color because they are eating organisms that contain the naturally occurring Astaxanthin. Farmed salmon subsist on grains, fish oils, etc and come out looking grey unless pigments are added to their feed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astaxanthin
Great lakes salmon flesh lacks orange coloring as well
Definitely not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvvshpw4FxM
Check at 6 minutes into the video.
interesting, the Salmon I have caught has not been as colorful- I mostly fish in the rivers though
edit: it looks like that vid had some steelhead (trout) mixed in? This is more like what I have seen, but the color is even more "dulled" in person https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e09UmeqAd4g
Do yellow 5 next.
I think this is a health and safety issue, and I think the food business has corrupted a lot of science.
Why do we need these dyes in food?
Why are so many people so unhealthy? Could it be the food we are consuming?
Are we tracking the health and safety data from these policy changes to know if there is a change?
> Why are so many people so unhealthy?
Because being unhealthy is the natural state of things, and keeping a handle on that fact, at scale, is difficult and complicated. We used to do a much worse job of it, though. Humans living in developed economies where everyone eats all these oft-maligned foods live much longer than their ancestors did a few centuries ago. And those who live into old age tend to remain healthier longer than those who did a few centuries ago.
That's to say that there isn't room for improvement, or that there aren't things in our food supply that don't belong there. But a sense of perspective is important. "Is this food coloring increasing people's lifetime risk of a specific cancer from 0.005% to 0.01%?" is still a pretty tidy improvement over, "Ugh, yet another outbreak of ergotism. Well, why don't we try burning witches to see if that puts it to a stop."
I think being healthy is far more natural than you say.
Go look at how native or indigenous people live vs people in cities.
One of the things they have that people in developed economies generally don't is a 50% infant mortality rate.
The ones that don't achieve it through access to very unnatural artifacts such as vaccines that are quite likely to have been made using ultramodern technologies such as genetic modification.
Or, I've got quite a few friends who have various congenital conditions that mean that they absolutely would not have survived in a society with a more "natural" foodway. With the modern food supply chain, though, they're doing just fine. Unnatural things you get in some ultraprocessed foods, such as vitamin fortification, mean they can even do it without having to worry about developing comorbid chronic ailments due to malnutrition.
This is somewhat survivor bias though, because all the dead that didn’t survive their youth are actually dead.
In wealthy countries these would-be-dead people walk amongst us.
That is a survival bias. Ironically if you want signs of good health practice look for unhealthy people - it means that they can survive vs the unhealthy just dying.
A really good example of this was the paper that kicked off the whole "omega-3 fatty acids for heart health" thing. It ultimately got retracted.
The gist of the paper was that they observed that Inuit communities have really low rates of heart disease, and hypothesized that it could be because their traditional diet is very high in omega-3 fatty acids. The problem is, they don't actually have low rates of heart disease. They just have low rates of heart disease diagnosis, because they also have limited access to health care.
Little s Science can’t get “corrupted” because it is just a tool. When the scientific method is used to determine what people prefer to buy based on one second of looking at the product, that is arguably an immoral use of the scientific method especially if the health of the users is not taken into account.
That’s also to say that “trust the science“ can be a dangerous way to shut down discussion when people are actually grasping for words to understand whether a scientific method is being improperly used.
Are people so unhealthy? Life expectancies continue to rise. The "a majority of americans have a chronic health problem" stats include things like back pain. It turns out that if you live a long time you get chronic health problems.
> Why are so many people so unhealthy? Could it be the food we are consuming?
There's no doubt about this. High sugar, low fiber is the biggest culprit.
There's doubt about this. While high sugar and low fiber is problematic, sheer quantity might be a bigger culprit. And some indigenous populations seem to remain relatively healthy on low-fiber diets (i.e. eating mostly animal products).
https://archive.ph/Wq46t
What bugs me the most about companies like Kraft is that they could have replaced artificial dyes and ingredients any time they wanted to, but didn't. Clearly these companies are in it to make money, and they will sell the public whatever the public will eat, synthetic ingredients be damned, but maybe.. just maybe the government should be much, much more restrictive on the ingredients that goes into our foods...
> What bugs me the most about companies like Kraft is that they could have replaced artificial dyes and ingredients any time they wanted to, but didn't
They had replaced a lot of them already. Kraft's most iconic product (Mac & Cheese) replaced the artificial dyes years ago and this is only the last 10% of their products.
Are artificial dyes actually bad for you?
> Are artificial dyes actually bad for you?
The fact that this is a legitimate question is very concerning. Some of these dyes are/were ubiquitous and there is very little research about them. IIRC a few have evidence of harm. Nothing should be this widely deployed without understanding them more.
If you were more questioning "Is natural actually better for people or just a nice sounding word" which could also be implied by your question, I agree with that, with the caveat that artificial stuff has more potential for surprises since it doesn't have the history of being used safely "natural" stuff does, and should have a higher bar of research.
It's also an easy thing to focus on. How many products that use dyes are extremely unhealthy for other reasons? If you are buying a cereal loaded with sugar and pretend to care about dyes for health reasons I'm going to laugh at you.
There are a lot of different artificial dyes. Most of them haven't been extensively studied in a rigorous way. It probably isn't even possible to determine whether they have any negative effects on human health because there's no ethical or affordable way to run that experiment. Since dyes are purely cosmetic and there's no actual need for them then it might be better to just avoid the risk.
If you care about being healthy why are you eating kraft mac and cheese in the first place.
People act like taking the food dye out of gushers is suddenly going to fix their problems. You need to avoid this food in the first place.
Good example of perfect being the enemy of good, or less bad.
The greater problem is normalization of unhealthy food across an entire supermarket. Then it becomes unavoidable and invisible to consumers.
My personal bugaboos are added sugar and generous use of weird preservatives. If your supermarket has 20 aisles, 16 of them are loaded with sugary sulfite-preserved stuff, removing choice and visibility to consumers. And breads fortified with folic acid.
Re: preservatives, I remember watching a video a few years ago, where a woman decided that she didn't like all the preservatives in store-bought tortillas, so she was going to make them herself at home. It's a really simple thing to make, so why not?
They all went stale before the day was out. She compared the ingredients between what she had made and what came out of the box at the grocery store, and the ones that she didn't use? They were all preservatives.
Choose your battles wisely.
I will concede that the use of sweeteners in everything in the US is unhinged. It's hard to really understand until you've spent enough time out of the country to where you're buying groceries and looking at the ingredients. You come back to the states and everything tastes weirdly sweet. It was a real "fish don't know they're wet" moment for me, which mostly came about from marrying an Australian.
This is fair, but I think overstated. It's possible to preserve a tortilla for a few days without exotic additives. I'm not even criticizing sodium, although that's not a lot better. And yes, preservatives are better than eating spoiled food.
The problem is when the whole supermarket is full of highly preserved food, then this is normalized and health consequences are obscured. The deeper issue is that for perhaps 80% of people this is fine and profitable, but for let's say 20% it introduces weird, hard to trace health problems, which don't appear to come from the supermarket because all the normal foods are like this.
Is sodium content comparable?
I'm still upset that I picked up a set of those little fruit cup things advertising "no added sugar", only to be met by intensely bitter and gross flavor. Turns out they added monk fruit extract instead, as an artificial sweetener. To FRUIT. Fruit is naturally sweet!
Del Monte's No Sugar Added line of canned fruits often has Acesulfame Potassium and Sucralose in it. Similar no sugar added generic/house brands are similar.
https://www.delmonte.com/products/fruits/pears/sliced-pears-...
Flour fortification is one of the great public health successes of the 20th century, and I’m not aware of any data showing that folic acid is any more harmful than any of the other synthetic B vitamins added to our food. I’ve actively looked for such data, as someone with the fairly common genetic mutation affecting MTHFR, and frankly all I find is nonsense.
To expand on "great public health successes": folic acid supplementation is particularly important if you're pregnant, because it significantly reduces the odds of having a baby with neural tube defects like spina bifida (which is one of the milder NTDs, frankly). But it's also important even if you're not pregnant because B vitamin deficiencies will wreck your health.
This also reminded me of a great post from a few years ago about why salt is fortified with iodine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38782954
Yes, the FDA has been emphatic that the folic acid supplementation program is a success and we would be fools to think anything else. The reality, as best I can tell, is more nuanced and for a minority of people it's possible to have too much of a good thing, particularly where 5-MTHF would be more beneficial.[1]
I don't hope to resolve the debate, only to point out it should be possible to eat bread that is not fortified with folic acid, if for no reason than I'm not in the high risk group targeted by the FDA and there are potential benefits from reducing folic acid intake in the context of robust intake of folate from other sources.
Or, even simpler: why can't I buy bread without folic acid?
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11930790/
Right, so I looked at that paper and its citations, and I am still not seeing any studies showing that folic acid supplementation causes problems beyond "can mask signs of B12 deficiency," which is not very compelling. I did see one paper saying "we thought excess maternal folic acid consumption might lead to asthma in children, but nope, it doesn't." To be clear, my bias is actually against folic acid supplementation: we should be using bioavailable folate, at the very least in prenatal vitamins. But I just don't see any data showing actual harm from folic acid.
I can buy unfortified bread at each of the grocery stores in my small town. I can also buy it at the local bakery and at the bread stand at our small farmers market.
It would not surprise me that there are some places in the US that only have easy access to packaged industrial sandwich bread. It would surprise me very much if that was the norm for Americans.
This is interesting to me, because I'm not aware of anywhere I can get unfortified flour. Even the artisan bread at the farmer's market is usually made of flour subject to FDA regulations.
Bread is fortified with folic acid because it turns out it is really important for brain development during pregnancy and it can be too late to take supplements if you wait until you find out that you are pregnant. This is a positive public health intervention.
> Clearly these companies are in it to make money, and they will sell the public whatever the public will eat,
You are correct, but I find it alarming that anyone would deem this necessary to say out loud. These companies would happily watch us suffer an die from chronic illnesses en masse if it inched up their share value, as would any for-profit enterprise. The phrase "duh" comes to mind. The only thing stopping them is government regulation, though that approach is under perpetual attack by anti-government zealots, the most recent of which being Musk and his child assistants.
The most harmful ingredient in our foods is sugar. Should the government restrict that?
Absolutely, stop subsidizing corn and glucose syrup through ag policy, and tax sugar consumption. Mexico taxed sugar to mitigate obesity to great success. GLP-1s destroy demand (Walmart already sees this in their purchasing data for consumers who are on GLP-1s), but we should also restrict supply by not subsidizing it in the first place. Why are we paying both to make the poison and then treat the poison? Not very capital efficient!
After Mexico Implemented a Tax, Purchases of Sugar-Sweetened Beverages Decreased and Water Increased: Difference by Place of Residence, Household Composition, and Income Level - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5525113/ | https://doi.org/10.3945/jn.117.251892
Building upon the sugar beverage tax in Mexico: a modelling study of tax alternatives to increase benefits - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10649495/ | https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2023-012227
USA Facts: Federal farm subsidies: What the data says - https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-da...
(~40 million acres of corn is used for inefficient ethanol biofuels as well, but I will reserve that rant for another thread)
The wheat starch in pasta is rapidly converted to sugar during digestion.
Like there is probably some argument to be made about satiety, but I assure you, it is quite possible to consume excess calories in the form of pasta.
And then corn subsidies mostly benefit livestock and ethanol producers, processed food products are a small portion of the end use of field corn.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/choosing-good...
So if that's your concern, why are you talking about manipulating the market for the supply of one food, rather than taxing high GI foods? Or is it a case of corn syrup being good enough?
I completely agree with removing subsidies. I'm less convinced that ingredients should be banned. Weirdly the entire "supplement" industry can do whatever they want.
Not banned, taxed. These are behavioral economic nudges to encourage healthier outcomes. You can still get a Coca Cola, but the economics shouldn’t make it your primary source of hydration, right? If you’re expecting “will power” to fix this, the evidence is robust [1] that is not going to happen.
We tax alcohol and cigarettes similarly, and I don’t think it’s wild to consider processed sugars close to that same category from a health and reward center perspective.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43917096
Yes to the point of having it go under FDA review along with PFAS, BPA, mercury, etc. If sugar can survive their empirical heath analyses, then you can have all you want. Everyone should go and comment on the FDA's public docket if they feel the same: https://www.regulations.gov/docket/FDA-2025-N-1733
https://www.fda.gov/food/food-chemical-safety/list-select-ch...
They don't care until there is some combination of public and government pressure, so you just have to keep pressuring, forever. Corporations are fundamentally unaccountability laundering profit machines (limited liability, nebulous shareholder ownership), and must be treated accordingly.
Which is the worst part about all of this: It took government pressure and calling them out to force a change. My anger at government is why they didn't do this SOONER? Why did it take someone like RJF jr. to move this needle? After all the people we've had at Sec. of Agriculture, HHS, and FDA Commissioners..
I don't think this was because people were putting pressure, otherwise the sheer numbers of those communities would have done something by now. It only required one person in power to say enough, fix this.
But, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, others have done this before RJF's appointment.
During the Obama administration, cherry picking some example:
* Food safety regulatory improvement bill: https://www.fda.gov/food/guidance-regulation-food-and-dietar... * Improved labelling rules: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/21/health/fda-nutrition-labe... * EPA water safety rules made stricter, then rolled back by Trump: https://www.sgrlaw.com/epa-announces-plans-to-revoke-obama-w....
It isn't correct to see these changes a singular improvement. These rules are constantly being fought over, sometimes becoming stricter, sometimes looser.
Another example, NYC has fought to reduce sugary drink serving sizes and to require labels on high sugar foods. (https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/cdp/added-sugar...)
Are you asking why people are more susceptible to demagoguery than science education? History tells us what we need to know about that.
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This is accepting the premise that something synthetic is automatically worse than something extracted more directly from nature. I'm all for researching and banning substances which are actually harmful, but not for paranoia and the automatic assumption that a certain amount of chemistry turns something "natural" into something bad.
For example carmine is crushed up cactus parasite insects which a very small number of people are vulnerable to extreme allergic reactions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochineal
>much more restrictive on the ingredients that goes into our food
How much human testing of every agricultural product do you want?
It’s bizarre, reading people here defending the artificial food dyes. Most of these are derived from petroleum. The stuff that comes out of the ground and powers your car and lubricates gears. It’s in your food and you’re OK with that?
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Mmmm... they'll probably use more Cochineal extract (bug derived) for red dye.
Wonder if we will see an uptick in allergic reactions.
https://news.umich.edu/food-dye-can-cause-severe-allergic-re...
I think beetroot is more likely.
I agree, but it looks like the article title is now "Backlash to artificial dye grows as Kraft ditches coloring for Kool-Aid, Jell-O". Seems like that's what their clickbait testing algorithm landed on.
Science (FDA) is what has allowed all the hyper-processed foods and food additives that are so often criticized here. Seems a bit disingenuous to suddenly recast those concerns as the "whims" of an ignorant person just because of his political affiliation. Take wins where you can get them.
That said Kraft is just positioning itself to provide what it thinks the market will want. They haven't suddenly found some ethics and decided they are going to produce good healthy food for its own sake.
We're talking about Kool aid. Changing the food coloring isn't going to make six cups of refined sugar healthy.
And it should be fairly easy for them because they're already doing it for most of the rest of the world.
The only institution cited in this article is from the "California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment" study. Otherwise it was consumer advocate groups. No FDA studies are cited and these are direct quotes from the article we both read,
>Kraft is the latest company, including Tyson Foods and PepsiCo, to transition from artificial colors for popular products under pressure from government officials.
“The FDA has failed for so many decades that state legislators had no choice but to step in to protect our kids.”
The FDA science isn't and hasn't been behind it but at state government scales dietary memes and their profitable consumer groups are influential enough. And now the feds have been coopted and the FDA is being forced into this by Kennedy. They're trying to migitate the damage as much as possible on the way down. Lets hope the replacements are so well and throughly vetted by science and time as the ones being banned for no reason but 'natural = good' memes.
The FDA 'allowing' hyper processed foods is a just what you get when you don't ban things pre-emptively or because you don't think people should be eating them.
People blame science when a company does something they don't like and then credit the free market when it does something they do, forgetting that a huge public company doesn't do anything because it is the right thing, they do it because they think they will make money by doing it.
We can either change the incentives that exist to sell people hyper processed food, or we can regulate everything to death, or we can figure out how to make people not want to eat it. I'm not sure which answer is the best one, but I think that making scientists the boogeymen for a human incentive problem is the wrong way to find it.
This is basically a stopped clock happening to be right.
AIUI, there's ample evidence that (certain) artificial food dyes can cause various problems. I know that I have anecdotal evidence that they can—even in "blind" situations, where we didn't realize they were in the food until after having problems—cause things like headaches, lightheadedness, and other vague but unpleasant reactions.
I find it frustrating that, as another commenter said, it took an absolute nutter like RFK Jr to make this happen, and also that I have to give him credit for anything positive—but it's pretty clear that this specific thing is, indeed, positive.
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> most of the rest of the world has regulated the heck out of these dyes
You may want to check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_number#E100%E2%80%93E199_(co...
Almost all dyes approved in the US are also approved in the EU. There are even a number of dyes approved in the EU but not in the US.
> often with warning labels required on packaging about the way this stuff makes kids ADHD
This does not happen.
To back that up:
> The most common synthetic food dyes in the U.S. — including Blue 1, Blue 2, Red 40, Yellow 5, and Yellow 6 — are all approved for use in Europe. They use different names for them there, which may account for some of the confusion.
https://archive.ph/2025.06.18-205957/https://www.thecut.com/...
Way too many people are getting their information on this topic from things like Tiktok and Instagram. Every video on there just proclaims how the EU has banned food dyes and additives that we use, therefore they're unsafe and we should ban them as well.
Never mentioned is that the US has also banned food dyes and additives that are still in use in the EU.
The US bans things when it threatens corporations, the EU bans things when it threatens Gaia.
/s
This and the Pharma advertising changes could be great.
I think it's important to judges individual policy, not just judge an individual.
Getting rid of pharma ads is going to be a first amendment issue, and should be struck down, as it likely will. Creating an environment where the goverment can single out who the first amendment does and doesn't apply to is far far worse than pharma advertising.
The first amendment doesn't apply as broadly to commercial speech as it does normal speech. There's already restrictions placed on it and a framework for deciding if further restrictions would be acceptable.
https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/central-hudson-test/
> The Central Hudson test has a threshold prong – does the speech concern lawful activity and is it non-misleading. If it meets these requirements, then there are three other prongs:
> The government must have a substantial interest.
> The regulation must directly and materially advance the government’s substantial interest.
> The regulation must be narrowly tailored.
It would seem like restricting medical ads would be within the realms of constitutionally acceptable government power.
The supreme Court already applies different rules for commercial speech than political speech.
See https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/central-hudson-test/
Why? Cigarette ads are banned from tv
If the Pharma industry as it exists, today could exist without federal government regulation, then I think you might have a point.
The government is so intertwined in the Pharma industry, that no I don’t really see a 1A problem here.
Sparing misused, and completely incorrect fire in a theater, tropes, there is a good point we made that freedom of speech does not extend to unnecessarily dangerous things. Remind me which company has received the largest criminal fine in history (Pfizer).
I just don’t think you’re gonna have a lot of sympathy for oh poor Pharma companies and their lack of free speech.
> I just don’t think you’re gonna have a lot of sympathy for oh poor Pharma companies and their lack of free speech
This is perhaps the worst argument possible for restricting the rights of a certain group.
Corporations are not people. They don't have rights.
Because they are government subsidized to the point of being an arm and they’re naughty?
Ok, but it works for me.
Do you think the original intention of the first amendment was to protect advertising on TV?
No. I don't think the fractal what ifs concerned them.
Do you think the original intention of the first amendment was to have a scattered subjective enforcement based on prevailing popular winds at any given time?
how did it take this long?
It would cost companies money to change their formula for food products and most additives are made by petrochemical companies so two industries with very strong lobbies to fight to keep them in use.
The red dye they use in a lot of stuff is absolutely psychoactive. I used to intentionally consume things with it on long drives because it zaps my short term memory so I don't get bored and fall asleep. I noticed this effect after eating some red candy while trying to do math homework in college.
The downside of course is that once you get where you're going you're practically retarded for the next 12 hours or so and can't get any work done.
Source on red dye being psychoactive?
A quick web search brought this:
* https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3441937/
* https://oehha.ca.gov/sites/default/files/media/downloads/ris...
* https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/red-dye-40-adhd
I thought it was moderately well known. A couple of decades ago a friend would take some red candy when hiking as it could give her (at least the feeling of) a significant short-term energy boost if needed, more than just regular sugar would.
I actually thought that particular red dye was banned where I'm from some time back, though I don't recall why. Allergies perhaps? But that's just a guess.
You'll have to look for it yourself I guess? I don't know if anyone has even tried studying it, the effect is pretty subtle if you don't know to look for it. I'm just posting my experiences with it.
You can't just make a massive claim like that about such a common ingredient without backing it up. I'm not saying it's not true, it could be, but it's just inappropriate to state something is true like that with 0 evidence aside from personal experience.
If that were the case posting on forums like this would be either entirely inappropriate or a complete waste of time.
Not at all. You can
a) Make claims that are not as extraordinary.
b) Back your claims up with evidence.
Making absolutely wild claims without evidence just makes you sound like a quack.
You complainers are missing the mark. You obviously can make extraordinary claims (see above for evidence).
What isn't reasonable is to also expect large numbers of people to take them seriously without evidence (see above for evidence of people questioning unsupported claims).
Maybe a better way to phrase our question is "is making such claims productive?"
See my above comment - it's a relatively well studied topic, and yes - there is a link.
Cherries are absolutely dangerous because when I eat them my breathing gets difficult. No idea why they still allow companies to sell them to people...
I'm sure you can grasp how ridiculous that statement is, and reflect on your own.
Heh, never said it shouldn't be allowed. I was just pointing out that some of these things are often more complex than they initially seem.
For the people downvoting this comment - it's a relatively well researched topic covered by at least three major studies with published papers, etc. If you are not aware of something, it does not necessarily mean it is wrong.